Scharer, W. (2019) The age of light. (First Back Bay paperback edition) New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company.
I don’t normally publish book reviews, but I might start with this one because of its potential interest to photographers.
I wasn't entirely sure what rating to give The Age of Light because I'm not certain what the book is meant to be. It's offered as a fictionalized biography of someone who lived in the recent past, a risky enough proposition because there are still plenty of people alive who knew Lee Miller. The author concentrates on Miller's romantic and work relationship with Man Ray, which is interesting in itself but already fairly well documented. So more a romance novel than a biography, but I pressed on because I was familiar with both Miller's and Ray's work and looked forward to learning something about their collaboration and world.
The focus on Miller's time in Paris is interspersed with distracting vignettes of her work as a war correspondent across Europe after D-Day. If these brief chapters are meant to show the arc of Miller's development as a photographer, they don't. Rather than explore her many years as an artist with her own studios in Paris and New York, the WWII material seems to be offered up as an explanation for some of Miller's renown and perhaps as a background to her later depression and alcoholism.
Much of the book appears to be an exploration of the photographer's struggle to become independent of men who have used and abused her and to be taken seriously as an artist in her own right. But art is precisely what is missing from this account. There are long descriptions of Paris, night clubs, food, drinking, bohemian parties, sex and arguments, where the author shows that she he has done her research. But there is not much talk about art. We know Miller's new circle is filled with artists and performers because they are all trotted out singly and in groups: Ray, Cocteau, Baker, Éluard, Picasso, Cocteau, Cahun, Bing... everyone gets at least a cameo. What are they creating? What are they trying to say? What drives them? What do they think about art? life? the world? We don't really know.
So how is the reader to understand Miller's desire to be taken seriously as an artist when the author pays scant attention to art or artists? It left a hole in the middle of the book that the period scenes, sex and emotional wrangling didn't fill for me.
