Whitney Scharer

Whitney Scharer is the author of The Age of Light.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You write that your "fascination with [photographer Lee Miller] sprang from images--images of her and images taken by her." What were some of the particular images that you found especially compelling?

A: There are so many images of and by Lee that I find fascinating. One thing I loved was how she often reinterpreted portraits of herself, created by Man Ray and other men, in her own work.

In one of Man Ray’s photos, he has Miller in the nude, her head caged inside a fencing sabre guard. Lee took the sabre guard and used it in her own shoot: in her version, her model is at ease, with the sabre guard wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl. Lee’s image reclaims the sabre guard from the sadomasochistic overtones it had in Man Ray’s work. When I was drafting my novel, I used the sabre guard photographs as a jumping off point for one of the first scenes I wrote.

Another of the first images I used in drafting my book was Dave Scherman’s photo of Lee bathing in Hitler’s bathtub after Hitler had fled Munich at the end of the war. Her expression in the pictures is...[read on]

Visit Whitney Scharer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue