The Age of Light

This month, my reading challenge was to read books set in Paris. My final selection was The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer, which I got as a Book of the Month pick about three years ago. Paris in 1929-1930, photography, and real historical figures make this a fascinating piece of historical fiction.

Summary

After years of modeling, Lee Miller has decided she wants to be behind the camera instead of in front of it. She’s in Paris, alone and adrift, but trying to make this daring career change at a time when there were few women doing the same. Lee ends up working as an apprentice for the more established photographer Man Ray. She quickly becomes his mentee, but they also strike up a romantic relationship, one that has a lot of ups and downs over the next year. Fast forward to WWII, and Lee is photographing the atrocities of war. And fast forward yet again to the aftermath of her career, and we see a very different woman from who she was in 1929. What happened in the intervening years?

Review

Before reading The Age of Light, I knew nothing about Lee Miller, Man Ray, or famous photographers of the 1920s and 1930s overall. But I am drawn to the arts in general, and I enjoyed learning about these real historical figures and their work in photography.

What struck me most was the Bohemian France setting. It was a turbulent and transitory time in history, and one that has always captured my imagination. I loved seeing Lee interacting with people in the art scene, from fellow photographers to painters, stage performers, and writers. There’s so much creativity, but also a lot of troubled and wayward souls. The Parisian setting is beautiful, even if Lee, an American, has a certain isolation there.

Lee was a model, but now wants a new career path. She starts working for Man Ray, and she’s quick to pick up photography skills. I liked learning about different photography techniques, especially lighting and contrast. But Lee has an upward battle in overcoming not just sexism, but also her past as a model. She wants to be taken seriously and seen as more than Man’s apprentice.

Man and Lee quickly develop a romantic relationship, and for historical fiction, this gets pretty steamy. Their relationship can’t be categorized as a romance, though. There is a lot of tension in their relationship, and things eventually devolve… possibly at the peril of Lee’s career.

In addition to the main story in 1929-1930, we also get snapshots (pun intended) of Lee’s life during WWII. At this point she is a photojournalist documenting the casualties of war-ravaged Europe. The woman she is here is so different from who she was a decade before. I enjoyed the dual timeline, which gave the novel more forward momentum.

Final Thoughts

The Age of Light is a wonderful debut novel of a woman forging a new path, learning her craft, and ultimately gaining recognition for her illuminating work. This will appeal to anyone who likes Bohemian France, artists of the time, and photography in particular. I enjoyed this and will look out for more books from Whitney Scharer.

Get the Book

You can buy The Age of Light here – it’s available as a hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook.

The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer
Audience	Adult
Genre	Historical Fiction
Setting	Paris, France; Sussex, England
Number of Pages	371
Format I Read	Hardcover (BOTM)
Original Publication Date	February 5, 2019

Official Summary

She went to Paris to start over, to make art instead of being made into it.

A captivating debut novel by Whitney Scharer, The Age of Light tells the story of Vogue model turned renowned photographer Lee Miller, and her search to forge a new identity as an artist after a life spent as a muse.

“I’d rather take a photograph than be one,” she declares after she arrives in Paris in 1929, where she soon catches the eye of the famous Surrealist Man Ray. Though he wants to use her only as a model, Lee convinces him to take her on as his assistant and teach her everything he knows. But Man Ray turns out to be an egotistical, charismatic force, and as they work together in the darkroom, their personal and professional lives become intimately entwined, changing the course of Lee’s life forever.

Lee’s journey takes us from the cabarets of bohemian Paris to the battlefields of war-torn Europe during WWII, from discovering radical new photography techniques to documenting the liberation of the concentration camps as one of the first female war correspondents. Through it all, Lee must grapple with the question of whether it’s possible to reconcile romantic desire with artistic ambition-and what she will have to sacrifice to do so.

Told in interweaving timelines, this sensuous, richly detailed novel brings Lee Miller-a brilliant and pioneering artist-out of the shadows of a man’s legacy and into the light.

About the Author

Whitney holds a BA in English Literature from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. Her short fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in numerous publications including Vogue, The Telegraph, The Tatler, and Bellevue Literary Review.Her first novel, The Age of Light, based on the life of pioneering photographer Lee Miller, was published by Little, Brown (US) and Picador (UK) in February, 2019, and was a Boston Globe and IndieNext bestseller and named one of the best books of 2019 by Parade, Glamour Magazine, Real Simple, Refinery 29, Booklist and Yahoo. Internationally, The Age of Light won Le prix Rive Gauche à Paris, was a coups de couer selection from the American Library in Paris, and has been published in over a dozen other countries. Whitney is the recipient of a 2020 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Fellowship in Fiction, and has been awarded residencies at the Virginia Center for the Arts and Ragdale. She teaches fiction in the Boston area and is a co-founder of the Arlington Author Salon, a quarterly reading series. She lives with her husband and daughter in Arlington, MA, where she is at work on her second novel.