In March 1928, in response to cries for updated publicity photographs from Scribner's, Hemingway went to the studio of Helen Breaker, an old friend of his first wife, who was just setting herself up as a photographer in Paris. The most striking images to come out of that session were a darkly shadowed series showing Hemingway in a visored cap. Investing Hemingway with a rough, masculine glamour, these images cast him as the matinee idol of modern letters. According to Dorothy Parker, women who saw these pictures turned "all of a quiver," and she worried that their publication drew too much attention away from Hemingway's virtues as a writer.
Hemingway, shortly before he left Paris in 1928
Helen Pierce Breaker (circa 1895-circa 1939)/ Gelatin silver print, 1928
Image courtesy Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts
