Philip Larkin / The Auto-Erotic Portrait Photographer Incapable Of Love

Philip Larkin, the Auto-Erotic Portrait Photographer Incapable Of Love

Written by Sarah Freeman

All images from The Importance of Elsewhere: Philip Larkin’s Photographs, courtesy Frances Lincoln/Estate of Philip Larkin

A new photobook explores the iconic poet Philip Larkin’s life as a photographer, the portraits of himself and the various women in his life revealing a man equally capable of care and romance, calculation and misanthropy.

In a re-write of a letter titled Letter to a Friend About Girls, addressed to his long-term friend and Oxford contemporary Kingsley Amis, the poet Philip Larkin wrote: