Quick-Eyed Love: Photography and Memory
by Susan Garrett
Category: Biography & Autobiography

In her memoir, Susan Garrett brings together key scenes from her girlhood in Pennsylvania during World War II with the art and craft of photography. She describes living with her irascible, social-climbing grandmother while her mother pieced together a living taking pictures of the children of the wealthy inhabitants of the Main Line, an elite suburban enclave of Philadelphia. Her mother, Alice Benedict, was one of the few women photographers of her day--a student and protégé of Alfred Stieglitz. Garrett sketches the science and history of photography, populating her narrative with legendary figures like Margaret Bourke-White, a bold contemporary of her mother and with whom Susan sensed her mother’s veiled competitiveness; pioneers of photography like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Daguerre, and Fox Talbot; and writers like Susan Sontag, whose work ponders the meaning and ethical responsibility of taking photographs of tragic events. Garrett also writes of unknown photographers and ordinary people who captured her imagination as a sensitive young girl--such as the Japanese man who taught her how to dry a stack of dishes, who later was sent away on a tip from her mother, most likely to an internment camp.