Books are good for you! #3
Geez, it's been an awfully long time since I posted about a book. In fact, I haven't done a book post since September when I wrote about Suzanne Berne's A Crime in the Neighborhood. I have been reading a lot lately -- right now I'm close to finishing Patricia Bosworth's Diane Arbus: A Biography, and I'm going to start out with talking about that, but it's not what I'm posting about.
Bosworth's book is well-written and engaging -- I only wish that she had been given permission to reproduce some of Arbus's work. I think it would help to have some photos of hers to reference, especially since Bosworth references a number of specific pieces. But reading about Arbus got me thinking about a different female photographer -- one whose work I remember from my childhood.
The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll by Jean Nathan is a biography of Dare Wright, the author of the Edith and Mr. Bear books, a series of children's books illustrated with photographs (also taken by Dare). I grew up reading my mother's copies of the Edith and Mr. Bear books, fascinated by the way Dare placed fantastical objects in real settings (for an example, check out this photo of Edith on a bridge).
The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll is $10 new (and as cheap as 50 cents used!) on Amazon. You can also read the first few pages of the book on their site.
Here's the official summary:In 1957, a children's book called The Lonely Doll was published. With its distinctive pink-and-white checked cover and black-and-white photographs featuring a wide-eyed doll named Edith, it quickly captured the hearts of young girls all over the country and made the author, Dare Wright, a household name.
Forty years after its publication, the book was out of print but not forgotten. When the cover image unaccountably surfaced in journalist Jean Nathan's consciousness one afternoon, she went in search of the book -- and ultimately its author. Nathan found Dare Write living out her last days in a decrepit New York City public hospital.
Piecing together interviews and documents, sifting through the thousands of photographs Wright had taken, Nathan uncovered a glamorous life. Blond, beautiful Dare Wright had begun her career as an actress and model and then turned to fashion photography before stumbling upon her role as a bestselling author. But there was a dark side to the story: a brother lost in childhood, ill-fated marriage plans, a complicated, controlling mother, Edith Stevenson Wright, herself a successful portrait painter, played such a dominant role in her daughter's life that Dare was never able to find a way into the adult world. Only through her work could she speak for herself: in her books she created the happy family she'd always yearned for, while her self-portraits betrayed an unresolved tension between sexuality and innocence, a desire to belong and painful isolation. [Edit: awhile ago I scanned one of Dare's self-portraits as reproduced in this book, you can see it here, I also scanned another photo of Dare that you can see here]
If you're interested in reading some of Dare's books, the majority of them are back in print and can easily be found new or used.