The historical past of images has made it clear that the digital camera is a subjective device. The glass lens frames the story in a different way relying on who’s doing the trying, and the way. So what are we to make of the pictures of a lady in a glass home, the historical past of which has been obscured by a patriarchal tradition’s short-sighted view?
In her e book Virtually Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth (2025), essayist, artist, and architect Nora Wendl “explodes the sex-and-real-estate fable” of the long-lasting Edith Farnsworth Home, designed by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the eponymous doctor.
The e book’s so-called explosion occurs in sluggish movement, web page by web page, not solely via Farnsworth’s archives, papers, and poems but additionally via Wendl’s writing and images, together with her personal constructed photographs that aren’t all the time distinguishable from the archival ones.
All through her greater than 10 years of analysis, Wendl repeatedly comes up towards the assumption that Farnsworth was in love with Mies van der Rohe, and that when their affair was over, she plotted to sue him and break his status. However, in reality, the story goes like this.
Between 1949 and 1951, Mies van der Rohe designed a glass home for Edith Farnsworth on Fox River in rural Illinois. He sued her for charges they by no means agreed to, and he or she countersued him due to the ever-increasing prices of the runaway undertaking. In 1956, a choose dominated that the 2 should settle. So, Wendl asks us: “What makes a lady plausible?”
The writer’s voice is piercing, sharpened by her dedication to appropriate or at the very least reframe current accounts of Farnsworth’s life. Within the vein of archivist Jenn Shapland’s memoir My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (2020), which illuminates the titular author’s queerness, Wendl attracts consideration to gaps and silences that sign the presence of different issues, different folks, and different methods of being. Tracing Farnsworth’s life, Wendl grants us glimpses into her personal as she chronicles her transfer from Chicago to the deserts of New Mexico, leaves one job for one more, and slips between worlds, at instances undetected and at others uncovered. The parallels between the 2 ladies’s lives mirror these of numerous others: deflecting the advances and insults of males, defending their very own wishes and experiences, figuring out their very own identities and fates.
I discovered myself deeply eager about Wendl’s embodied visible interpretations of Farnsworth’s life, artworks in themselves. In her {photograph} titled “I Listened” (2017), Wendl portrays herself within the glass home, “respiratory out and in dying” whereas mendacity on a mattress that served as a stand-in for Farnsworth’s personal (the home had been staged for public excursions). The picture performs on ambiguity and visibility: blue disposable shoe covers, a conservative Nineteen Forties black costume, the mattress conforming to the load of Wendl’s physique that’s seen solely from the knees down, palms clasped on her stomach, the curtains drawn simply so, the whole composition seen via a glass wall.
Wendl is nicely conscious that philosophers have lengthy written about homes as psychological areas. “Researching a lady who would construct a glass home for herself is a selected type of being alone,” she writes. Her descriptions of the home, knowledgeable by Farnsworth’s archives, communicate of suffocation and saving one’s personal life: “Lighting a fireplace within the fireside within the hermetically sealed home triggered inside unfavourable strain — the skin air moved in, blowing out the fireplace. To maintain the fireplace burning, she opened the door.”
Historical past, like glass, is tough to see. It’s all the time, slowly, shifting and tricking the attention. Wendl’s account of Farnsworth, and of herself, affords an architectural blueprint for ladies in all places: “to reject the constructions handed to them, to construct new ones.”
Virtually Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth (2025) by Nora Wendl is revealed by 3 Fields Books and is on the market on-line and thru impartial booksellers.
