Before he won the Nobel Prize in 2003, J. M. Coetzee was a computer
programmer. And before he was a writer, he was apparently a passionate
amateur photographer.<p>This New York Times story about an exhibition of newly descovered
Coetzee photographs, taken with a Wega 35mm camera in the mid-1950s,
is really interesting.<p>The first volume of Coetzee's fictionalized autobiography, Youth,
contains an account of his career as a programmer at IBM
in London in the 1960s.<p>"At 18 he might have been a poet. Now he is not a poet, not a writer,
not an artist. He is a computer programmer, a 24year old computer
programmer in a world where there are (yet) no 30 year old computer
programmers. At 31 he is too old to be a programmer: one turns oneself
into something else - some kind of businessman - or shoots oneself"<p>And of course, as covered previously on HN, he used that computer at
night to write poetry of a kind:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776042" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776042</a>