Review — The Age of Light

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.

A Handful of Dust

On a visit to Toronto, I had the opportunity yesterday to visit an interesting exhibit at the Ryerson Image Centre. Curated by David Campany, A Handful of Dust: From the Cosmic to the Domestic brings together work from a broad range of artists (Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Jeff Wall, Walker Evans, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Mona Kuhn and others), all connected thematically with dust. Campany has also published a book of the same name as a catalogue and further exploration of the theme.

The pieces, mostly photographs but with one or two paintings and a couple of video installations, seem to have been selected by Campany as conceptual responses to a photograph by Man Ray (Dust Breeding, 1920) of a piece by Marcel Duchamp. The monochrome photograph looks like it may be an aerial shot of a wasted landscape, but it is hard to get a sense of scale because of the lack of reference points and the uniformity of tone and colour. All the viewer has to go by is line, form and texture. In fact, the photograph depicts a glass plate that had collected a thick layer of dust while lying on the floor of Duchamp’s studio. Viewers are informed that the two artists may not have agreed who was ultimately responsible for the work and later agreed to share credit.

Robert Burley – Implosions of Buildings 65 and 69, Kodak Park, Rochester, NY [#1], October 6, 2007

The selected images are set in two rooms and, apart from a few dust-related quotations painted on the gallery walls, visitors are largely left to derive their own meanings from the display (which I welcomed). The sources of the dust vary—sand, destroyed buildings, human beings—but the overall message is one of human impermanence and mortality: sand covers everything in its path, the built environment doesn’t last forever, humans shed skin and eventually shed their lives.

At the same time, the dust that gathers can both conceal and reveal. It can cover tracks but it can also heighten our ability to see texture and form.

Nick Waplington – from the series Patriarch’s Wardrobe, 2010

I went to the exhibit because I have often appreciated the shows that the Ryerson Image Centre hosts, although I have to admit that I was a bit doubtful because of the subject matter. In the end, I was won over and came away thinking that it amounted to an excellent meditation on aspects of the human condition. The images on display also served to show the power of abstraction and the role of imagination in interpreting  what appears in front of us. In short, the show works.

A side benefit of the visit to the Ryerson Image Centre was a chance to see Extending the Frame: 40 Years of Gallery TPW. The show is a history of the founding and evolution of the Toronto Photographers Workshop (TPW), a group which has worked diligently to advance photography as an art form and has involved such people as Edward Burtynsky, Robert Burley, and the duo of Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge. It was fascinating to see how the dedication of a relatively small number of people has had such an impact on the direction of photography and art more generally in Canada.