The historical past of pictures has made it clear that the digicam is a subjective device. The glass lens frames the story otherwise relying on who’s doing the wanting, and the way. So what are we to make of the photographs 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 myth” 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 gradual movement, web page by web page, not solely by Farnsworth’s archives, papers, and poems but additionally by Wendl’s writing and images, together with her personal constructed pictures that aren’t at all times distinguishable from the archival ones.
Nora Wendl, “Edith Farnsworth House Terrace” (2006), C-print (picture courtesy Nora Wendl)
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 damage his fame. However, in actual fact, 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 woman believable?”
Unidentified lady, probably Swiss-American pianist Jenny Geering, on the Farnsworth Home round 1954 (picture courtesy Newberry Library and Farnsworth household)
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 individuals, 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 occasions undetected and at others uncovered. The parallels between the 2 girls’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 serious 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, “breathing in and out death” 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 Forties black gown, the mattress conforming to the burden of Wendl’s physique that’s seen solely from the knees down, fingers clasped on her stomach, the curtains drawn simply so, your entire composition considered by a glass wall.
Edith Farnsworth (proper) with Beth Dunlap (left), her affected person and the spouse of William Dunlap, who designed the home’s screens and wardrobe, sitting on the steps of the home round 1951 ({photograph} by William Dunlap)
Wendl is nicely conscious that philosophers have lengthy written about homes as psychological areas. “Researching a woman who would build a glass house for herself is a particular kind 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 fire in the hearth in the hermetically sealed house caused interior negative pressure — the outside air moved in, blowing out the fire. To keep the fire burning, she opened the door.”
Historical past, like glass, is tough to see. It’s at all times, slowly, shifting and tricking the attention. Wendl’s account of Farnsworth, and of herself, presents an architectural blueprint for girls all over the place: “to reject the structures handed to them, to build new ones.”
Virtually Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth (2025) by Nora Wendl is printed by 3 Fields Books and is obtainable on-line and thru unbiased booksellers.
