The Age of Light

The Age of Light is a biographical novel by the American writer Whitney Scharer, published in 2019, and her first.

Lee Miller goes to Paris in the late 1920s to make art rather than to be looked at, having spent years in front of a camera as a model. There she becomes the assistant, and then the lover, of a celebrated photographer whose household and studio take up most of her time, and the novel follows what she manages to make in that situation and what it costs her to make it. Scharer writes about the technical business of photography as well as the emotional one, because her subject's way out of the position she was in was an understanding of what the machine could do. The book also follows Miller into the Second World War, where she worked as a correspondent and produced the reporting that the novel treats as her own arrival as an artist.

The novel was Scharer's first, and it takes its title from the period of photography between the wars. Scharer alternates between the Paris years and the war, so the reader knows where the story is going before her subject does.