Introduction

Bestselling author Whitney Otto’ s Eight Girls Taking Pictures i s a profoundly moving portrayal of the lives of women, imagining the thoughts and circumstances that produced eight famous female photographers of the twentieth century.

This captivating novel opens in 1917 as Cymbeline Kelley surveys the charred remains of her photography studio, destroyed in a fire started by a woman hired to help take care of the house while Cymbeline pursued her photography career. This tension— between wanting and needing to be two places at once; between domestic duty and ambition; between public and private life; between what’s seen and what’s hidden from view—echoes in the stories of the other seven women in the book. Among them: Amadora Allesbury, who creates a world of color and whimsy in an attempt to recapture the joy lost to WWI; Clara Argento, who finds her voice working alongside socialist revolutionaries in Mexico; Lenny Van Pelt, a gorgeous model who feels more comfortable photographing the deserted towns of the French countryside after WWII than she does at a couture fashion shoot; and Miri Marx, who has traveled the world taking pictures, but also loves her quiet life as a wife and mother in her New York apartment. Crisscrossing the world and a century, Eight Girls Taking Pictures is an affecting meditation on the conflicts women face and the choices they make. These memorable characters seek extraordinary lives through their work, yet they also find meaning and reward in the ordinary tasks of motherhood, marriage, and domesticity. Most of all, this novel is a vivid portrait of women in love—in love with men, other women, children, their careers, beauty, and freedom.

As she did in her bestselling novel How to Make an American Quilt, Whitney Otto offers a finely woven, textured inquiry into the intersecting lives of women. Eight Girls Taking Pictures is her most ambitious book: a bold, immersive, and unforgettable narrative that shows how the art, loves, and lives of the past influence our present.

Editorial Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, December 2012: We rarely hear grown women called "girls" these days, unless they've gone wild, but it was common practice in the settings for Whitney Otto's affecting portraits of female artists. The author, who has spun tales of women and crafts before (eight other ladies starred in her 1991 best seller, How to Make an American Quilt), takes a fresh approach here. More a novel in linked pieces than a set of discrete works, Eight Girls Taking Pictures introduces a range of protagonists in various eras and countries, each with a shutter-happy dream and an obstacle in the way of achieving it. These roadblocks take the form of men--unrelenting fathers, unsympathetic husbands--and social trends, including racism, homophobia, and aversion to the idea of females as creative. Otto's intelligent, sensitive approach to the plight of these women gives Eight Girls its appeal: Safe in our modernity, we trust that their talent will win out in the end. --Mia Lipman

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by LorrieE (see profile) 05/19/13

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