Eight Girls Taking Pictures (57 page)

“Did you like the pictures?” (interrupting him as he replanted the garden).

“Did I reveal too much?” (interrupting him while he read students’ papers).

“Am I terrible mother?” (interrupting him as he wrote an article about unusual European gardens).

 • • • 

Abner turned away from his desk to face his wife, who sat on the love seat in his office. “I love the pictures. I think they’re the best things you’ve ever done. You know and I know that there’s no point in making
art unless you try to say something, and that you may fall short of your vision, sometimes the best work you can do exists in that grand misstep.

“When they say things about you being a mother, what they’re doing is ignoring the fact that you’re an artist. It’s insulting, because you stay home and are happy to stay home and out of this experience you attempt to render the depth in domestic life. No one attacks Vermeer for spying on the women in his household. No one comments on his parenting. Seriously, are your photographs any more homebound than his paintings? At least you weren’t tiptoeing around and peeking through keyholes, freaking out over all the letters being written, read, and passed around.

“Baby, you’re punished if you make your art outside the home, and dismissed if you make it
about
the home. My God, you make the choice to
be
home, and it isn’t enough. It wasn’t just that you made people think about the complexity of childhood—you forced them to look at the complexity of motherhood. They wanted pretty, and you went for grace.”

Sam Tsukiyama called her. “Cymbeline Kelley used to say that men ban women from the battlefield, then tell them that the only important pictures are taken on the battlefield. She said that women were kept at home because the men needed them at home, yet when they make art reflecting, or inspired by, the only life they were allowed, the result is dismissed as trifling.

“When she was first married to Leroy, she took a number of nude pictures of him—this was during the same time that male photographers were photographing nudes of women. She took so much shit for those pictures that she didn’t show them again for fifty years. You make me miss her.”

In the early fall, after all the noise about
Summer Studies,
offers came in for shows and lectures. The negative attention was starting to compete
with a great deal of positive attention, but all Jenny wanted was quiet. She wanted to work on a new project (as did her publisher), but she was empty of ideas. The girls were not as willing to be photographed because it meant being home more and they were at ages when anyone else’s house was so much more intriguing than their own. Jenny also realized that it was childhood, more golden and fugitive than she’d ever imagined, that was her subject.

She was cleaning out her studio and darkroom as both preparation and, she hoped, inspiration when she came across the black leather case that her father had given her along with the Seneca No. 9. As she moved it to free up the space it was occupying, she thought she should consider using it when she took landscape pictures. Or architectural pictures. Opening the long-ignored, never-used (by her) case, she found six exposed glass plates.

The next day, Jenny pulled the glass plates out of the black leather case thinking (hoping) that engagement in one activity could lead to that rare moment when an idea—one that hadn’t even yet occurred to her—would catch. The sort of situation where if you
appear
to be working, then you will find yourself actually working. Proficient enough now to print without Sam’s guidance, Jenny began the task of printing the exposed glass plates that had been stored in the black leather camera carrying case that Ed Schonneker had given to Mr. Lux when he bought the Seneca.

1. Waiting Room, Anhalter Bahnhof

(A cavernous train station of four waiting rooms, including one used exclusively by the Hohenzollerns)

2. Mathematics & Love

(“I’m going to do a mathematical problem in my mind, and when you think I’ve come to the point of the greatest intensity of thought, take the picture.”)

3. Tulips

(A crown of tulips in his hair)

4. Late at Night, the Brandenburg Gate

(Avoiding the awkwardness of a shared room)

5. Something to Want

(Julius looking up at Cymbeline from the crowded Berlin sidewalk where all she could see was him)

6. The Unmade Bed

(Two confessions of love)

But Jenny saw only a railway station waiting room with passengers dressed in turn-of-the-century clothing and signs in German; a nice-looking man of about forty, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, lost in concentration; the same man with tulips in his hair, maybe sitting in a park. She recognized Berlin’s best-known landmark, the Brandenburg Gate (briefly thinking of her own visit there with Abner on their two-year European honeymoon in 1971). She saw another picture of the same man, previously lost in thought, and with tulips, only now he looked up from the street at the photographer. She saw the unmade bed with the slept-on sheets and a woman’s hairpins.

Jenny strung the pictures across the darkroom and examined the prints as if they were a story unfolding, one that she thought she grasped, only to lose the meaning. Even when she was sure that these were Cymbeline Kelley’s misplaced pictures, the ones she “couldn’t bring herself to print,” and the man was quite possibly Julius, she still couldn’t say with certainty what it all meant. The images enhanced, then negated each other. Nothing was fixed. Nothing is any one thing really, and isn’t that the beauty of it all?

This book is a work of fiction inspired by several real women photographers whose lives and work have influenced my own. Those real women include Imogen Cunningham, Madame Yevonde, Tina Modotti, Lee Miller, Grete Stern, and Ruth Orkin. I should say that while I’m fascinated by photography—in its almost perfect intersection of machine, chemicals, and art—I’ve never considered becoming a professional photographer. The work of these particular women happens to coincide with how I see the world; the “stories” present in their pictures have meaning for me.

My treatment of the lives of these photographers is imaginative. For example, it’s a fact that Imogen Cunningham spent a year in Dresden studying photochemistry. The invention is everything else. I don’t know the exact nature of Madame Yevonde’s marriage; I only know that she mourned her husband when he died. Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach opened a studio in Berlin specializing in advertising photography, but I know nothing of their personal lives beyond the fact of their friendship. And Ruth Orkin’s model for
American Girl in Italy, 1951
—a woman named Ninalee Craig who went by the name Jinx Allen—was not a privileged girl traveling on an aunt’s largess, but an adventurous former nursery school teacher who saved up for her six-month holiday in Europe.

 • • • 

Like any novel, this book can be considered both an interpretation of real life and a portrayal of invented lives. I think of it as portraits rendered
with words instead of paints—or as a series of photographs. When a photographer takes a picture, she is photographing an actual person, place or object. While there is some play in taking the picture (the use of filters, various lenses, camera speeds, flashes), making the picture doesn’t end there. Many photographers will say that so much more happens in the darkroom or on the computer than a nonphotographer can imagine. There is the manipulation of the printing, of contrast, of color. There is hand-coloring, cropping, touching. Photomontage and collage are still another way to create meaning, using pieces of pictures to make a single photograph. One can also take a series of whole pictures and juxtapose them to create a narrative, allowing the photographer to make her own interpretation of the images. The photographers in my book had film; I have words.

This novel is my love letter, my mash note, my valentine to these women photographers, whom I have loved for most of my adult life. It is a fictional, sentimental history; it is not a biography of these women. It would be a mistake for any reader to skip their biographies and monographs if this novel sparks any interest in their pictures and their lives.

In writing this book, I consulted several important nonfiction accounts of the lives of these photographers and the time period. I am listing them here so that curious readers can read the real stories of these women’s lives on their own.

Albers, Patricia.
Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti
(Clarkson N. Potter, 1999).

Anderson, Mark M., ed.
Hitler’s Exiles
(The New Press, 1998).

Burke, Carolyn.
Lee Miller: A Life
(Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).

Calvocoressi, Richard.
Portraits from a Life: Lee Miller
(Thames & Hudson, 2002).

Chadwick, Whitney.
Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement
(Thames & Hudson, 1985).

Constantine, Mildred.
Tina Modotti: A Fragile Life
(Rizzoli, 1983).

Cunningham, Imogen.
Imogen! Imogen Cunningham Photographs 1910–1973
Margery Mann, ed. (University of Washington Press, 1974).

Dater, Judy.
Imogen Cunningham: A Portrait
(Boston: New York Graphic Society Books, 1979).

Dater, Judy, and Jack Welpott.
Women and Other Visions
(Morgan & Morgan, 1975).

Engel, Mary.
Ruth Orkin
(Mary Engel, The Estate of Ruth Orkin, 1995).

———.
Ruth Orkin: Frames of Life
(documentary, 1995).

Gibson, Robin, and Pam Roberts.
Madame Yevonde: Colour, Fantasy and Myth
(National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1990).

Gordon, Mel
Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin
(Feral House, 2000).

Haworth-Booth, Mark.
The Art of Lee Miller
(Yale University Press, 2007).

Hole, Lawrence N.
The Goddesses: Portraits by Madame Yevonde
(Darling & Co., 2000).

Hooks, Margaret.
Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary
(Pandora, 1993).

Lorenz, Richard.
Imogen Cunningham: Ideas Without End
(Chronicle Books, 1993).

———.
Imogen Cunningham: Flora
(Bulfinch Press, 1996).

Lottman, Herbert R.
Man Ray’s Montparnasse
(Harry N. Abrams, 2001).

Lowe, Sarah M.
Tina Modotti: Photographs
(Harry N. Abrams/The Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1995).

———.
Tina Modotti and Edward Weston: The Mexico Years
(Merrell, 2004).

Mann, Sally.
Immediate Family
(Aperture, 1992).

Metzger, Rainer, and Christian Brandstatter.
Berlin: The Twenties
(Harry N. Abrams, 2007).

Obra Fotografia en la Argentina: Grete Stern
(Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 1995).

Orkin, Ruth,
A World Through My Window
(photograps). Text assembled by Arno Karlen (Harper & Row, 1978).

Penrose, Antony.
The Lives of Lee Miller
(Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985).

Penrose, Antony, ed.
Lee Miller’s War
(Bulfinch Press, 1992).

The Photomontages of Hannah Hoch
(Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1996).

Prose, Francine.
The Live of the Muses
(HarperCollins, 2002).

Rodgers, Brett, and Adam Lowe.
Madame Yevonde: Be Original or Die
(The British Council, 1998).

Ruth Orkin: American Girl in Italy, The Making of a Classic,
introduction by Mary Engel (Howard Greenberg Gallery and the Ruth Orkin Photo Archive, 2005).

Salway, Kate.
Goddesses and Others: Yevonde: A Portrait
(Balcony Books, 1990).

Stern, Grete.
Sueños
(Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, 1995).

Weitz, Eric D.
Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy
(Princeton University Press, 2007).