Lee Miller in Fashion

Lee Miller in Fashion by Becky E. Conekin  224 pages

This is another one of the books in our Fine Arts collection which I picked up after reading The Age of Light.  It's a wonderful example of how Lee Miller defied categorization, moving from model to muse to photographer and war correspondent. She was a celebrated Surrealist who fought for recognition of her own work when Man Ray took some of the credit, and her fashion photographs are some of the best known from the late 1920s to the early 1950s.  While she was recognized as an important photographer in her lifetime, many of her images had remained unpublished. This book shows how the world of fashion shows as the framework for Miller's creative development, but also how to see how her work showed the effect of war on the lives of women in the 1940s and 1950s.  This book combines text with archival fashion photographs, contact sheets, her published illustrations and her memos, so it's more than just a book of photographs -- it's a great reference tool for understanding Miller and her work.

The Age of Light

The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer    384 pages

This novel is based on the life of Lee Miller, a Vogue model turned renowned photographer and her quest to forge a new identity as an artist. Filled with accurate details about Miller's life, the author begins in the more present day and then takes the reader back to when Miller made the decision to go to Paris in 1925.  Miller made a connected with the famous Surrealist artist Man Ray, who at first just wants to take her photos. However, she is determined that he teach her about photography and eventually he does. As they work together in the darkroom, their professional and personal lives become intertwined, changing the course of Lee's life forever.

The author takes us past Miller's relationship with Man Ray into her work in the battlefields of World War II Europe, and also delves into how Miller discovered new photography techniques and also how she documented the liberation of concentration camps as one of the first female war correspondents. Scharer doesn't shy away from gritty or unpleasant details, and I felt I really got a great feel for how Miller's life must have been.  She's not always an easy person to understand or like, but the way she is depicted in this novel, she seems completely real.  I had been familiar with Miller's work and some of her life story, so it was really interesting to read this novel.  I felt the author did a great job of bringing this amazing woman's life into the spotlight (even if it wasn't always a beautiful or charmed life).

I Crawl Through It

I Crawl Through It by A.S. King, 319 pages

“Four teenagers are on the verge of exploding. The anxieties they face at every turn have nearly pushed them to the point of surrender: senseless high-stakes testing, the lingering damage of past trauma, the buried grief and guilt of tragic loss. They are desperate to cope, but no one is listening.  So they will lie. They will split in two. They will turn inside out. They will even build an invisible helicopter to fly themselves far away...but nothing releases the pressure. Because, as they discover, the only way to truly escape their world is to fly right into it.”  I’m honestly not sure that I completely understood what was going on in this book.  It wasn’t awful but it’s not my favorite by King.  I would probably only recommend this to teens that had read and liked her previous books.