Eight Girls Taking Pictures (31 page)

The final window was of a factory girl clad in ruby velvet overalls studded with rubies. Ruby and diamond cuffs sparkled on each wrist as she tightened a cog with a gold-painted wrench while peering through her sunglasses, sky blue lenses set in round tortoiseshell frames. Her high-heeled shoes were an intricate web of red satin and velvet ribbons.

If Charlotte was sure of nothing else, she knew that even women who didn’t work in offices or factories or fix their own supper would recognize the lives in the window. They would recognize them and, in
a passing fit of fantasy, imagine they were in their place, sentimentally perhaps, but that wouldn’t stop them from responding to the daydreams of working girls. Desire, thought Charlotte, only unexpected desire can have any effect.

She wandered over to the secretary’s window and dropped into the leather office sofa. It was hard to imagine that she’d be keeping her job, or that she’d want to keep her job if all it meant was dressing and undressing mannequins without doing anything more interesting than pretending they were guests at a party. Charlotte struggled to see the reasoning behind selling goods if you weren’t selling the
ideas
behind the goods.

While she tried to muster up the energy to find Miss Schmidt and learn her fate, which she was fairly sure would be to dismantle everything, she noticed a young woman taking in the window displays. Some of the passing crowd still stopped to look, but not with the undivided interest of the young woman.

Charlotte watched her pause before the first scene, studying it, leaning a little to one side. The girl looked to be about Charlotte’s age and was, not unlike Charlotte, dressed in a gamine outfit of a crisp white men’s shirt tucked into pleated trousers topped with a wide, simple belt with a rhinestone dress clip attached just next to the buckle. Her navy blue wool overcoat was tailored, though unbuttoned; Charlotte noted the way it tucked in at the waist before flaring out again and stopping midcalf. Charlotte had spent enough time around luxury to recognize the very fine coat as easily the most expensive item the girl wore. But the trousers, the rhinestone pin, and the lack of a hat (in winter, no less), revealing her unfussed, bobbed hair, pulled Charlotte’s attention. The young woman was, in short, adorable.

As this thought occurred to Charlotte, the girl wandered over to the secretary scene, breaking her concentration long enough to see Charlotte. At first, she seemed slightly startled to see a live girl keeping company with the imitation girl. Then she relaxed, smiling a smile so unexpectedly charming that Charlotte could not breathe.

It was decided that while the elder Blums were in England for an extended period, Charlotte and her brother, Trilby, would stay in their parents’ modernist house of glass located on the edge of Berlin. The hard, reflecting surfaces stood in contrast to the garden of roses that surrounded the home. Climbing roses, wild roses, trees of roses. The large garden and glass house, designed by Charlotte’s architect-father, Bruno, were bordered by a tall stone wall that hid both house and garden from the street.

The family loved this house to distraction. They loved it for the play of light through the walls of glass, loved how the walls slid away, transforming the large, undivided living space into a kind of industrial gazebo. They loved the extreme height of the ceilings, the kitchen, with its sleek cabinetry that ran almost unnoticed along one wall. The most expensive element of the house was the series of retractable skylights in all of the bedrooms, reduced in size so that more space could be given over to the public rooms and studios where Mr. and Mrs. Blum worked; he was an architect, she designed glassware, and together the family had a thriving glass-manufacturing firm, Blum GlasWerks. Trilby had a compact studio whose decor still reflected his student days at the Bauhaus, where he had taken classes on all manner of design—furniture, lighting, carpets, textiles, glass, and pottery. And Charlotte’s tiny studio of colored pencils, pastels, watercolors, inks, and papers and was atop the garage, accessed by a sky bridge.

Inside the home, colorful carpets in geometric patterns sat on planked floors (the bedrooms) and concrete floors (the studios and living room). The furniture was leather and comfortable and avant-garde. Charlotte’s parents had included touches of velvet and aged crystals, but so perfectly that the connection between glass and velvet, concrete and crystal was seamless. The success of her parents’ company depended upon the Blums’ love of the new.

Books lined the floor-to-ceiling shelves. There were tables of metal and mirror, lighting fixtures of aged metal and amber glass. The displayed art was spare and well-chosen—a small sculpture here, an oversize oil abstraction there—all of it personal, not simply decorative.

It would be safe to say that no house ever represented a family as this house did the Blums: their twentieth-century ideas, their intellect, their commitment to high and popular art, their unity. Their unwavering affection for each other.

In 1914, at the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition, Bruno Blum built what looked like a Turkish temple made of glass. The monumental dome, which swirled like a serving of whipped cream, was a multihued fantasy of diamond-shaped panes of wavy glass in paint-box colors ranging from indigo and rose at the base through deep green and grass, to lavender, to buttery yellow, pale orange, and back to an incandescent yellow that resembled pure light.

Etched lines of modernist poetry wrapped around the exterior walls.

Inside the temple were a pair of clear glass stairways that bordered an interior waterfall, the water mirroring the wavy glass in the dome.

This little pavilion of color, light, and glass honored the workers at Blum GlasWerks while announcing Bruno Blum’s dream to make a “crystal world.” Mr. Blum was not a religious man; he, along with his family, adhered to humanist values. Kindness and forgiveness were his moral compass, and a belief in the possibility for an earthly paradise found through glass.

Glass, he reasoned, allowed people to be seen, and loved. It invited light into people’s lives, making it inevitable that transparency, and a banishing of the darkness, would naturally lead to a better world. If you called Bruno Blum a utopian, he would agree. “So I’m a little luftmensch,” he would say with a laugh. “There are worse things.”

While Bruno Blum pursued his realization of livable glass buildings (his wonderful home being one example), his brother ran the factory, along with Trilby, who was being groomed to take over the entire operation. Blum GlasWerks made not only ordinary windows but also windows for churches and synagogues and department stores. It was the company that most of Europe looked to for municipal aquariums and flower conservatories. They made art glass for interior doors and windows.
Every German who could afford it purchased a Blum greenhouse, or garden house.

The greenhouses further fueled Bruno Blum’s ideas regarding glass structures that housed people instead of plants. His philosophy of glass led to the establishment of the Glass Chain—a series of letters among ten other architects who loved glass and steel as much as Bruno Blum. Eventually, the paper conversation became influential as close to home as the Bauhaus and as far away as the rest of Europe, and America.

In between his glass projects, Blum built public housing, fanciful and solid. Not pure glass, but full of windows and sunlight just the same, as he made the correlation between contentment and light.

Marcelle Blum, Charlotte’s mother, was a designer of glass tiles, vases, smaller decorative windows, transoms, and light fixtures for a dedicated department of Blum GlasWerks. Mirrors. Floor screens. A collection of breakable animals that pleased adults as much as they did children. The waiting list for her chandeliers and floor lamps alone was impressive.

Rainier Ermler, the photographer, had been a friend of Bruno Blum since Charlotte was very young. He specialized in architectural and landscape photography. Not surprisingly, the several portraits he made were so saturated with light that the faces resembled the facades of buildings.

Mr. Blum and Rainier Ermler were involved with the architects at the Bauhaus in Dessau, who taught progressive ideas of form and function, looking at the construction of a thing as well the “nature” of an object. And the idea of beauty “doing something” and not just “being something” was meant to affect the lives of the common man too. The school held classes in painting and color theory and textiles, pottery, and wall coverings; typography and advertising and architecture, while photography came and went until Rainier Ermler and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy made it a more permanent fixture in 1929, around the time that Rainier was shooting Bruno Blum’s Rainbow on the Rhine, an apartment complex meant to mimic the Royal Crescent in Bath while allowing maximum light to the interior. Its arc shape and pastel coloring had earned it the descriptive
nickname. Mr. Blum didn’t care what it was called as long as there were those who called it “home.”

 • • • 

It could be said that Rainier Ermler cared more about painting with light than he did about psychological insight, or placing his unseen self in the photograph. Exercises in abstraction didn’t interest him; his pictures always looked like what they were: a cup, a rose, a hand. A house of glass, an arc-shaped apartment complex of many hues. A face flooded with light. He wanted the building (the interior, the portrait, the cup, the rose, the hand) to be exactly what it was, yet presented in a new way.

He would say to Charlotte, “If I photograph you in the shadows, you become mysterious, perhaps unknowable. If I light you from above, so your eyelashes throw shadows on your cheeks, you could be a Hollywood film star. And if I fill the room with light, to an almost unforgiving degree, it will flatten your features, as if I am a public servant taking a passport photo.”

“I like the idea of the passport photo,” said Charlotte.

Rainier said, “That’s because, in trying to hide nothing, it prompts the imagination. We ask, ‘Where is this person going? Where is she from?’ ”

“But you said you wanted the thing to be ‘what it is.’ ”

“Yes. And it is. It is a face, a portrait. We can all agree. Whereas we may not all agree when looking at an abstract picture—‘oh,’ we say, ‘That’s a mountain. No, it’s a teapot.’ But by not disguising the thing in the picture—in this case, the face—we are freed to move beyond what we see. We are past What is it? and on to What does it mean? What’s the story?”

“All right then,” asked Charlotte, “what is the difference between your passport picture and my snapshot? Is my snapshot as interesting?”

“Sometimes. The difference—and this is what I will teach you, okay? The difference is that if your interesting snapshot is an accident, you aren’t controlling the outcome as much as something simply caught your eye and, snap, snap, there you are. This is why people are bored with most snapshots of someone’s vacation to the spa or the seashore.

“But, when you learn about light, you learn that light is everything. Contrasts of white and gray and black. We photographers are lashed to light and time, and we must make the most of both. If I’m good, I can get a picture that looks like a snapshot but feels like mystery. Maybe even a masterpiece—a Vermeer!” He stopped, sighed. “The most important thing I can say is that you must be precise. You must be particular.”