An Imaginative Art of the Real

No one who has read either or both of Susan Garrett's books about health care, Taking Care of Our Own: A Year in the Life of a Small Hospital and Miles to Go: Aging in Rural Virginia, will be surprised by the quiet authority of her narrative voice or the lovely lucid prose of her latest book, Quick-Eyed Love: Photography and Memory. Memory, yes, but the reader will discover that there is more here even than a compelling memoir.

The author recalls growing up in Pennsylvania during World War II with her maternal grandmother, Louisa Cox Benedict, and her divorced mother, Alice Benedict Jackson, a gifted photographer. Mrs. Benedict left her Alabama home and moved north. Driven by social aspirations, she married a quiet Pennsylvania insurance man and determinedly attempted to work her way into Philadelphia society. To make her daughter, Alice, more appealing to an appropriate suitor, Mrs. Benedict sent her to Leopold Auer, "the best violin teacher," and then for a year to the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. The academy convinced Alice that she had no talent for drawing; and so, when she saw a man bent beneath the black cloth of a camera on a tripod, she immediately asked if he would teach her how to make photographs. Susan Garrett reconstructs that life-altering scene: "An instant, a moment, in which she found a way to fill her bright mind. She could choose where to stand and what to let into the camera to fill the empty spaces left by a broken path through school. Photography is an art like no other. It is generous. It does not exclude. It let my mother educate herself, gather facts by seeing."

Which is how Quick-Eyed Love is made—with a generous eye that gathers not just fact but renders truth. Susan Garrett's vision is inclusive. She gives us her memories, but the lens of her imagination takes in much more. She understands what the novelist and photographer Wright Morris (one of many photographers Garrett mentions) means when he says: "To confess up a life requires the same imagination it takes to create one."

Included in this handsomely produced book are some twenty-five photographs by master photographers, seven of them by Alice Benedict. In order that her reader may fully appreciate her mother's talent and technique, Garrett works into Quick-Eyed Love a short history of photography so clearly and lyrically written that its science becomes a kind of poetry. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Daguerre, Fox Talbot, Ansel Adams, and other photo artists join Alice Benedict's mentor, Alfred Stieglitz, and the accomplished Margaret Bourke-White as characters in Garrett's tale. Bourke-White represents the legendary figure Alice Benedict might have become had she been, as Bourke-White was, free of all family responsibilities.

Garrett's grandmother, who reflected the cultural attitudes of the times, made no allowances for a daughter's aspirations that went beyond motherhood and homemaking and social climbing. Alice Benedict felt strongly the pull of the art of photography, even as she felt familial and societal pressures to find a husband, a father for her daughter, and to be the cultured woman she was expected to be. Alice Benedict had married the man her mother had arranged for her to marry but, after three months, left him. Susan Garrett recalls how she perceived her mother's situation: "She was not married, which I understood to be a serious sadness." All ties with Mr. Jackson were severed—"no money for child support, no visits." The search for a husband continued until Alice married a veteran of World War II who had a chauvinistic view of marriage and who became increasingly dependent on alcohol. In her compassionate depiction of her mother's inner conflicts, Garrett ends up speaking for all artists and dreamers forced by family, by custom, by fortune, good or bad, to postpone their true callings or to settle for something less.

Garrett has...