The best novels featuring pioneering and trailblazing photographers

My first choice (and my favourite of the selection) introduces us to two of the pioneers of photography. Not only did In the Blink of an Eye teach me about the link between Robert Adamson and William Henry Fox Talbot (inventor of the calotype process), but I realised that I had stayed at one of the novel’s key settings – Rock House, on the slopes of Edinburgh’s Carlton Hill. 

In 1843, the artist David Octavius Hill was tasked with painting the portraits of 400 ministers of Scotland’s Free Church, a commission so daunting it seemed almost impossible. It would take years to capture the likenesses of so many men. Only when Hill met Robert Adamson, a pioneering photographer, did a solution present itself. 

Bacon doesn’t only give us Hill and Adamson, but brings to life some of the women whose names have been forgotten by history to life: names that include Jessie Mann, who is now acknowledged as the first Scottish female photographer. And because Hill, a respected artist, saw the enormous potential of photography, he was instrumental in changing opinion about photography. It, too, could be an art form! 

I have always had a fascination with Lee Miller, but would have been too much in awe of her to attempt a fictionalised version of her life. And yet debut novelist Whitney Scharer did just that, triggering a bidding war in the publishing world.

The focus of the novel is one episode in the life of an extraordinary woman. Scharer parachutes us straight into bohemian Paris, 1929. Lee Miller has abandoned a successful career as a model at New York’s Vogue to pursue a dream. She doesn’t want to be in front of the camera any longer, she wants to be behind it. And she’s identified a man she thinks can help her – the charismatic and egotistical Man Ray. There’s just one problem. May Ray doesn’t take on students. He’s about to meet the one woman capable of changing his mind.  

As they work side by side in Man Ray’s studio, more than one kind of chemistry is at play, but when two forceful personalities collide, sparks fly!

I loved the ambitious concept behind William Boyd’s novel. Take seventy-five ‘found photos’ and construct a life around them.

At the age of seventy, Amory Clay is reflecting on her long photographic career, which took her from London, where she photographed the smart set, to Berlin where she captured its nightlife. Like Lee Miller, Amory Clay transitioned from New York fashion shoots to photojournalism, reporting on war-torn Normandy, and, much later, in the Vietnam war. Now, she’s about to embark on a personal mission—to track down her daughter, Blythe.

Boyd seamlessly weaves fact with fiction. This was one of those books that had me Googling the names of characters, thinking that there must be two photographers I had overlooked, only to conclude that they were fictional. (I shan’t give the game away and tell you which!)

What the author does brilliantly is to depict the random nature of artistic success. Twenty years ago, on the morning after a dinner party, struggling photographer, Rebecca Winter, acted on a whim. She photographed the scene that confronted her when she entered the kitchen. The Still Life with Bread Crumbs of the book’s title captured the public’s imagination and went on to win a major award, making Rebecca an unwitting women’s champion. 

Fast forward to the present day. We see Rebecca as a 60-year-old divorcee. Now that offers of work have dried up and seeing no other solution to her financial predicament, she exchanges her New York apartment for a cabin in the back of beyond.

Exploring the woods surrounding the cabin, Rebecca stumbles across a series of mysterious white crosses with accompanying pieces of memorabilia: a small trophy, the plaster cast of a handprint. Thinking of the objects only in terms of composition, framing, and light, she fails to ask herself, is there a story behind these miniature shrines?

Dorothea Lange went on to achieve fame as a documentary photographer during the Great Depression, but this book takes us back to the 1920s and her arrival in San Francisco. Working as a photographer’s assistant, Dorothea has scrimped in order to save her earnings, in the hope of establishing her own studio. But within an hour of getting off the bus, she falls victim to a pickpocket who takes every penny. 

With only wits and talent to survive on, like the residents who rebuilt the city after the great earthquake, Dorothea too must find a way. Soon she meets Caroline Lee, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, who is her introduction to Monkey Block, the artists’ colony at the beating heart of the bohemian city. Until she makes her name, studio portraits must be her bread and butter until, with Caroline at her side as an assistant, Dorothea opens her first studio. But this is an age of prejudice. Dorothea must decide: what is she willing to sacrifice in order to achieve success in a man’s world?

And when she meets and later marries the famous painter Maynard Dixon, will she be able to persuade him that she is as serious about her own career as he is about his?