Sf photos
Kam gave me a very cool gift the other day: a book called The Faces of Science Fiction, published in 1984, which consists of photos of 82 sf writers, plus a little blurb written by each of them. The blurbs range from interesting to goofy; mostly I just think it's really cool to see photos of various people. Many of them I've either seen in person or seen other photos of, and some I've even met, but there are a fair number who I'd never seen pictures of. I like knowing what authors look like, or even what they once looked like.
(Sadly, at least 15 of the authors pictured are now dead; several of those have died in the past couple years.)
There's a set of photo portraits of sf people that travels around to various cons—or perhaps only WorldCons, not sure—that I like for similar reasons. The first time I saw it—WorldCon '89, I think?—I thought it was photos of all the pro guests at the con, and was very disappointed when I couldn't find most of them.
I'd love to see such a project online; seems like it'd be the perfect place for it. There are certainly starts toward such a collection: for example, what sparked this entry was seeing that Ellen Datlow has posted a set of photos from this year's Authors/Editors party in NYC (including photos of several people I don't think I've seen pictures of before, such as Janet Kagan, Alice Turner, Paul Witcover, Shawna McCarthy, Jaime Levine, and William Shunn). And I had no idea what Jonathan Carroll looked like. And of course there are many sets of convention photos that various people have posted on their own sites.
Of course, ideally this would be done by a pro photographer (like the book, and the traveling exhibit), which probably makes it not so feasible. But I suppose even an amateur snapshot gallery—one decent picture each of every pro who's willing to be photographed—would be pretty cool.