by Whitney Otto
“You’re kidding,” said the professor.
Jenny turned her attention from the girls. “Why didn’t I know this?”
Sam said, “She got a Guggenheim and needed someone to help her print a barrel of glass plates.”
“A barrel?” asked the professor.
“I was really just one of the boys who helped her.”
“What kind of camera did she use?” asked Jenny. “For the plates, I mean.”
“I don’t know. When I knew her she only had the Rolleiflex.”
“When was this?” asked Jenny.
“I must have been twenty, twenty-one. The project took a couple of years. She really couldn’t do it herself, so once she taught me, I became pretty proficient. The fact that I became the ‘print guy’ was really one of timing.”
“She must have been close to ninety,” said the professor. “What was she like?”
It was then that Bunny took all the cards, laughing, and threw them into the air, making Babe furious (she was winning) and Agnes sigh in imitation of adult exasperation, which pretty much ended the conversation.
“What was she like?” asked Jenny later that evening, when she and Sam sat on the porch, looking at the stars and sharing a cigarette. Abner was getting the girls to bed while the professor was settling into the large shingled guesthouse.
“Tiny.”
“Everything I think about her has always been influenced by that photograph with that beautiful naked girl. You know, the Rollei around her neck—”
“—in her garden,” he said. “The Jessie Berlin.”
“It’s a great picture.”
“Cymbeline was kind of a great person but, you know, not perfect or anything. She could be kind of tart.”
“Was she mean?”
“Oh no. But you didn’t want to bore her. Not that she expected to be entertained, but she did think everyone should bring something to the proceedings, as she used to say. It was really about being a good conversationalist. She didn’t have a lot of patience, I guess.”
“And not married?”
“She was, once. She said their friendship began only when they were no longer married. Leroy had passed by the time I knew her, but I had the feeling that she always cared about him.”
“What else did she talk about?”
“She hated the Vietnam War, and got along well with people younger than her grandchildren. I wouldn’t call her maternal, exactly. We were friends. Loved her own children, though she wasn’t one of those people who seemed to live through them, you know? She took pictures of them”—he hesitated—“like that one you found. In your camera. Weird, right?”
“It was probably just in the style of the time.”
“Probably.”
“Most likely,” said Jenny. “It wasn’t as if San Francisco was a tiny backwater with one camera, and one woman taking pictures.”
“True. Anyway, when I was helping her with the printing project, I made a print of a portrait of Cymbeline. She was so young I didn’t recognize her at first, and she was standing in front of some kind of outside wall with a sort of gray, ornate etching on it. I knew that she had made some self-portraits when she was young, but this one didn’t look like she was alone, if you know what I mean. You could see it in her expression. You know, there’s such a fine line between being conversational and being intrusive, so I didn’t say anything and just put it in with the other pictures I printed that day.
“As she was leafing through the pictures, she stopped when she saw herself. I thought I heard her say, ‘Julius,’ but so softly I couldn’t be sure. She slipped the picture from the others and went and sat in the garden. She just wasn’t there, you know?”
“Who’s Julius?”
Sam shrugged and shook his head.
“She never said anything?” asked Jenny.
“I just left her alone. Then the next day, when I came to work, I could see that she had been going through all the plates. The place looked frantic, plates everywhere. She must have dropped a few, which didn’t surprise me because she wasn’t very steady later in the day, and I can only imagine her at night. I just started cleaning up and reorganizing and acting like everything was normal and she didn’t look as old as she looked that day. I mean, Cymbeline didn’t really seem old, generally speaking.
“She wanted to know where I had found that plate and I told her it was in with the others and she said that she thought they were gone.”
Jenny and Sam said nothing. Stared at the stars.
“Do you think she meant ‘I thought they were gone’ as in ‘I thought I’d gotten rid of these?’ Or like ‘I thought they were gone’ and was relieved that they weren’t?”
“She said there had been a fire in the house she shared with her family in Seattle, so there’s that. It was clear to me that the plates she was asking about may have been kept apart from the others—or were meant to be kept apart? I don’t know. I asked if maybe they were with some plates that she had already printed, and she said, no, that she always meant to print them, when the time was right, but somehow the time was never right.”
“What do you think was on those other glass plates?”
“Maybe she had a secret life,” said Sam.
“Yeah, maybe she was like Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour,” said Jenny.
Once Jenny had recorded the days of her daughters, she wanted to record their nights. One photo has them sleeping, tangled up in the sheets and each other, three exhausted Greek muses. Another is of Bunny, in her cotton nightdress, the pearls around her neck and wrist reflecting in the moonlight as she reclines upon tossed pillows, her only companion a cat; she is a girl in her room who is expected to spend the night spinning straw into gold. In another, the moon contours Babe’s thin shoulders and face; the oldest girl, also in her nightclothes, seems to be waiting for something, or someone, as she gazes toward the open door. Agnes, topless in underwear, her chest draped with necklaces of pop-beads and rhinestones, in the moonlit garden, with a silver paper crown, joyful and regal as if patrolling her kingdom.
Jenny made a picture of two of her girls kissing each other good night. It was chaste, and blurred from the action of the kiss. But it was at night. It was also on the mouth.
“Jen,” said Abner, studying the collection of photographs of their three girls taken over three summers, beginning in 1986, soon to be published in a book called Summer Studies, “I love these.”
“Do you?” Her happiness was leaving her a little breathless.
“I do. All these seemingly unimportant moments when you rush around, not even thinking about them. God, look at Babe, when she just had to touch the center of that broken car window. The blood. The crying. I remember that day.”
The accompanying essay by Sam Tsukiyama talked about Jenny “locating the darkness, the complexity of childhood and parenthood.” He used words like authentic when describing the scenes of Babe, Bunny, and Agnes holding Kali the cat too tightly, or imitating adults by pretending to drink coffee and smoking, or displaying stitches on a knee from an unfortunate experience with the concrete patio. He wrote about her night pictures, and how they were “little fairy tales,” slightly mysterious and otherworldly, and how the darkness and the moon are different experiences for a child than they are for an adult. Sam wrote about life and death and Freud’s pleasure principle, and growing up, and how childhood is sometimes more like a kind of parallel universe that adults can see but cannot quite enter.
He wrote about the natural, eccentric beauty of Summerplace, and how Jenny Lux recorded her children’s lives without sentimentality and with an avalanche of affection. It was a risk, he said, for a female photographer to take pictures of her children because doing so made it easier to dismiss her, to treat her pictures as a vanity project. Cymbeline Kelley took nudes of her children, but she is known for her flowers and plants and celebrities. Miri Marx’s most recognized pictures are of an American girl in Italy and a series taken from her apartment window,
but not of the children she raised. If a woman must take photographs of children, then they must not be her children. It’s too easy to label these women’s family photos unprofessional, unlike male photographers, who are praised for the shots, often nude, of their wives and lovers. Loved ones, it seems, has many meanings.
And he wrote about how, in postfeminist America, Jenny Lux was a woman who not only chose to be home but found her great subject in the home, which somehow was the most radical thing of all.
The first copies of Summer Studies were confiscated in two independent bookstores in Ohio. Mississippi followed suit, then Indiana. Then the rest of the South, with the exception of Florida (not quite the South) and New Orleans (immune to being puritanically bossed). Those feral children; those night pictures.
Libraries weren’t easily bullied; they’d seen all this before, but even they couldn’t stop people from borrowing the books and then never returning them.
Claiming to be the New Voice of the New America, there were those who made it their mission to attack artists like Mapplethorpe, Serrano, and Sturges. It didn’t matter that they weren’t in a majority, or that they could choose not to look at the work of Mapplethorpe, Serrano, and Sturges; they knew what they didn’t like, and that was enough for them to decide that if they didn’t want to see it, no one should see it.
They justified their grievances by talking about “public money” or “graphic sex acts on film” or “child pornography,” but what they really meant was: no support for the arts, no homosexuality, and no attempting to record a human life from the cradle to the grave.
The stores that kept Summer Studies did so from back rooms. You had to request it.
Many of the weekenders and townspeople, as if to prove that Stellamare really was a small (and small-minded) American town, used this opportunity to express their opinions regarding Jenny, Abner, and the three summers Sam Tsukiyama spent at Summerplace. Of course, Sam was there when the girls were being photographed, they said (and those night pictures, why they could just imagine an adult creeping into their room, rousing them from their sleep, then photographing them in their subdued state). Of course, Abner was off, working. Of course, Jenny Lux was never like your usual girl, and wasn’t she rather exceptional and wild in high school? And who knew what really went on at Summerplace? All this criticism, they felt, was not mean-spirited because people followed up by saying that it wasn’t Babe, Bunny, and Agnes’s fault; some people went so far as to intimate that the Huxley girls needed rescuing.
The criticism would’ve been easier to brush off had it come only from the right, but there were also those on the left, many of them women, who took exception to the photographs, which they found objectionable for the same “pornography” reasons.
“At least I’m a uniter,” said Jenny to Abner.
“Yes, you’re like Gandhi,” said Abner.
And all of this was before anyone weighed in on the artistic merits of the work. “The silver lining,” as Jenny called it, “as if anything they can say would be worse than being accused of exploiting my own children.”
• • •
Jenny retreated into Summerplace. She didn’t know that success—and there were those who loved the pictures for so many of the reasons she hoped they would be loved—could feel like a chair being kicked out from under her. She began following Abner around, asking questions about her work:
“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.
PICTURES OF BERLIN, 1910
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?
AUTHOR’S NOTE
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.