Whitney OttoReseñas

Boring. Lots of profanity and sexual references. Apparently it's mostly about romantic relationships, and I'm not interested in that. I was interested in the quilt theme, which appears to be more of an afterthought.

Follows the lives of six members of a quilting circle. Interspersed with quilting directions that are more a commentary on life than quilting. Couldn't help wanting more about each of the women--each could have justified her own book.

Works better as a historical source book to jump into modernist photography than a novel. As unique and multifaceted as the stories are I couldn't relate to the characters. They seem to be bystanders of their time periods and geographical circumstances.

This is a really nice book. It seems to be somewhere between a collection of short stories and a novel. Separate stories with shared characters and places. The author's tone is very comforting and comfortable to read and can very gently sneak emotions up on you.

Based around a diverse group of women in a California town we see each of them growing up and living with changing attitudes to gender and race and the expectations and judgement of society. This is the kind of really thoughtful book that subtly highlights how easy I can have it as a white male without pushing anything. It's great to see those different viewpoints in a way that is quite easy to connect with.

I didn't finish it thinking "wow, I need to read that again" but I'm glad that I have read it.

I like the book, just not as much as the movie. In this case I feel like the movie actually had more detail and story line. Finn is barely mentioned in the book. The histories of the quilters are pretty much the same in the book and the movie from what I can remember anyway, which I liked. I haven't seen the movie in a long time though so I will definitely be watching it again soon to compare more.

I enjoyed this, but felt the theme got repetitive after awhile. I liked the first stories a lot. It does make me want to dust off my old camera, though!

I like the book, just not as much as the movie. In this case I feel like the movie actually had more detail and story line. Finn is barely mentioned in the book. The histories of the quilters are pretty much the same in the book and the movie from what I can remember anyway, which I liked. I haven't seen the movie in a long time though so I will definitely be watching it again soon to compare more.

This books is an interesting book to read if you are into female empowerment as well as photography. It tells the stories of eight females from different times, how they are treated. All of these women are photographers and they all have links to each other weather it is one went to a show that someone's photos were showcased in, or they have met each other somehow. I have enjoyed reading it. It is interesting to imagine what female photographers were up against in the past.

This is an interesting piece of "Modern Literature"..... poetic, waxing melancholia, & romantically depressing. The author earned rave reviews for "How to Make an American Quilt", which I did not read.

The beginning of each chapter offers us a B&W copy of a Ukiyo-e wood block prints and a brief explanation of the print the chapter that follows is likened to the story taking place in the print.

That being said; the book takes place in San Francisco with an odd group of friends 3-4 young women and one young man. One of the young woman is having a relationship w/ the young man and it all seems very casual..... Parties, drugs, and lethargic living.... people seemingly lost in a narcissistic culture.

I didn't like the characters, they had nothing to offer anyone..... they were shallow and uncaring people.

I would say that this book was a waste of my time, but as it filled the challenge requirement, it redeemed itself.

Didn't finish this one

Finished this one a couple of days ago. It is a decent read but didn't enthrall me. I liked the tie-in to quilting and the individual stories but didn't think it was cohesive as a single story.½

I found this an odd book. Not just the format- vignettes loosely bound together, styled after a Japanese courtesan’s ‘pillow book’ from the Edo period , each vignette featuring a different member of a group of friends. Set in 1980s San Francisco, these friends are late 20 somethings, all well educated but none working in the field that they are educated for. They float through life; drinking, smoking pot and sometimes doing coke, attending art openings and going to restaurants but mainly meeting at the Youki Singe Tea Room, a North Beach dive where pot smoking is allowed- but only in a small room.
Elodie is the woman who sets the tales down. She writes only when in the Tea Room, leaving her notebooks there. The characters- the collection of beauties- seem to have no ambition, content to simply live like butterflies, pushed by the winds of life. Connections between them turn to love, break up, and realign. There is no real plot; it’s just events happening in the vignettes.

While reading the book, I didn’t much care for most of the characters. Which makes it odd that I later found myself thinking about them, and going back and rereading sections of the book. The prose is beautiful.The vignettes are like little jewels. The book is physically beautiful, too, illustrated mostly with old Japanese woodblock prints but with a couple of 20th century works. To read this book is enjoyable, even if I didn’t connect with most of the characters.

This story is an extended analogy of the quilt as a life. Based on the lives of the women of a quilting circle, it is told in a manner I found disjointed and characters I had trouble understanding. Nonetheless it is an interesting and original work.

Short sketches of women photographers from early 1917 through mid-80's. Fictional depiction based on real photographers. Each vignette is fascinating on it's own and the later ones have some of the first photographers woven in as the years pass - revealing some later years.
Very "artsy" and indeed, much focus on the photography,as well as the locales and the society of the years depicted. I enjoyed the book and of course, now there are references to books about the lives of the actual female photographers that will have to be added to my "LIST" !!!!

Otto, author of "How to Make an American Quilt," presents eight fictionalized portraits of female photographers spanning the majority of the 20th century. Successfully exploring the challenges that women artists have faced throughout the recent past, this is an accessible work of fiction that is sure to be popular with bookclubs. The author includes a bibliography for those readers interested in learning more about the real lives and work of the women fictionalized in the novel.

Major Appeals: Character; Story

Further reading suggestions: A Short History of Women - Kate Walbert; A History of Women Photographers - Naomi Rosenblum

Eight Girls Taking Pictures

This was an interesting book for me. One because I am a professional portrait photographer, and 2 because I am also a woman.
But
I, did not lead an adventurous life or really break any new ground like each of these women did.
When I began my career in 1978, I was only one of a hand full for girls in my college for photography. The guys in my classes did not seem to mind or think it was weird for us to be taking photography and when I started looking for a job I found many professionals were excited to have the female perspective in their studios. I love to read about history now but then I really did not care about the beginnings of photography and was not familiar with what was done before the 70’s. I am also fairly conservative so most of the work these women were doing would not have interested me at the time. I have since became a digital scrap booker and also enjoy mixed media and really like playing digitally with my images much like some of these women did in the darkroom which now fascinates me how they made their photomontages.
There were many times when Mrs. Otto just blew me away with her understanding of the artist/photographers mind. I underlined many places throughout the book that inspired me. One of the most profound insights she put in her book was “Women seem to possess all the natural gifts essential to a good portraitist...such as personality, patience and intuition. The sitter ought to be the predominating factor in a successful portrait. I just screamed “YES” and was stunned a non-portrait photographer should grasp such insight. And then this one “if your interesting snapshot is an accident, you aren’t controlling the outcome as much as something simply caught your eye and, snap, snap, there you are. But, when you learn about light, you learn that light is everything. We photographers are lashed to light and time, and we must make the most of both. Wow, she really showed me she knows her stuff with that quote. I also learned something about myself by reading this book. As a mother I often felt I failed my girls because I was often short tempered with them. I felt selfish and never really understood why I should resent giving them my undivided attention after work until I read this quote, “What no one tells you about having children is that it isn’t the physical demand they make in your life that affects your art, it’s the emotional space they fill, crowding out your art. So even when you have the time to work, your still mentally occupied. Wow what a revelation for me and I still feel irritated when I cannot spend uninterrupted time with my creating. One more important quote for me was, “Art required solitude, a disengaged mind, free to sort through the inconsequential and the profound, sifting through the mess in the mind until it found what it sought.”

Some of the women’s stories were a bit racy compared to my simple Midwestern upbringing so some may find the book objectionable but I have to give it 5 stars because I related so much to each woman as an artist, woman and mother. I learned more about the history of my profession and the history of the world. I spent a lot of nights looking things up on the internet which is always worth 2 extra stars if a book inspires me to dig deeper. If you are artistic and a woman I think you will find by the end of this book you have been inspired and enlightened.

I received this book as a Goodreads ARC giveaway. This was a great book and I really enjoy it

Great idea, poorly executed. The flow of the book is halting, with portions that were overly detailed and other sections that seemed to have large gaps. I had difficulty following several of the women's stories and kept thinking I had inadvertently skipped a page on my kindle. It could have used a really good edit.

Eh...not what I expected. Characters and topics were too weird for me. Had to struggle to finish. Did not identify with anyone.

I absolutely loved this book. Not because Whitney Otto is a brilliant writer, but because I was fascinated by the women photographers who were the subject of this novel -- which was really a loose collection of short stories. From the beginning, I wanted to learn more about the real photographers and their lives. The young women, born between the 1880s and the 1920s, shared some characteristics. Most were from unconventional families, where women were encouraged to find careers and a passion. The photographers -- Imogen Cunningham, Madame Yevonde, Lee Miller, Tina Modotti, Grete Stern, and Ruth Orkin -- all fought for a place as artists. Ruth Orkin epitomizes the woman who has a husband and a family, but also strives for a career and artistic expression. Unlike some readers, these women didn't blend together for me at all. They shared similarities, but even today, the lives these women built for themselves would be remarkable. They shared a drive to create and express themselves.

In these eight loosely connected stories, Otto portrays the lives and struggles of eight women photographers through the 20th century. Six of the eight are based on real photographers, including Ruth Orkin; Imogene Cunningham; and Lee Miller, and astute readers will recognize their lives and works in these fictionalized tales. All eight women are interesting and bohemian, ahead of their time in many ways; they take lovers of both genders, travel the world, get caught up in wars and revolutions. But at the same time, all struggle to balance their creative impulses and careers as artists with their domestic roles as wives and mothers.

As the stories continue, some may feel that the eight women are insufficiently differentiated, their lives and inner thoughts so similar, their struggles much the same despite differing time periods and differing countries. But in this similarity perhaps lies Otto’s underlying point in portraying these eight women…the more things change, the more they stay the same. Despite decades of social change and the groundbreaking women who have come before, the later women still face the same struggles as their predecessors.

Goede sfeerschepping, zwakke inhoud

After 88 pages of this slow-moving book filled with alternating chapters of quilting instructions and the stories of women in a sleepy California town, I gave up. The movie was much better.

- read for the March Book-a-Month Challenge 2008This is the story of several women in a quilting group in a small town in California. A different woman's story is told in each chapter, and, for each story, the author provides an analogy to some aspect of quilt-making. As each woman's story is told, the reader also gets occasional glimpses of the other women through another's eyes. It's an engaging look into the lives of several very different women who still manage to come together to create quilts.½

Although a short book, this was a difficult read. It never came together for me. I did not like the vague instructions of quilting. And the only thing I really learned about quilting was that it would be tedious from all aspects. As for the characters and their story--jeez, she was all over the map and I still don't know squat about them. By the time I got to the end, she just abrubtly stopped. I think if she had kept her focus on Glady and Hy or Marianna and Anna, or even the just the men, it would have much for a much better story. As it is you're left with a bunch of pieces and absolutely no clue as to how to put them together.