Katherine Keenum

Although “Anonymity” is stalled at the moment (I’m writing an unrelated novella), images that belong to my heroine Mattie’s world draw me back into it. Both the beauty of this photograph and the earnestness of the artist would, I think, appeal to a wistfully idealistic side of Mattie. Although she works in the pulp end of publishing, she also fosters young talent and encourages writers and artists to strive for their best. Read More 

And now back to school! Early in my research on women’s art education, I  Read More 

Blog tip: Check out two photographic blog posts at Spitalsfield Life. Together they offer countless visual details and suggest scores of stories. Women of the Old East End publishes carte-de-visites of women from the 1860’s to 1940. I’ve chosen this girl with her  Read More 

Follow-up: After the mention of Atget in yesterday’s post, I took another look at some of his work and came across this image at the Princeton University Art Museum. No wheelbarrow or handcart, but good horse-drawn carts!

After rereading a couple of chapters of ANONYMITY, my work-in-progress, I took a break by Googling images related to women's suffrage. This one popped up without any documentation, but for my purposes, that didn't matter. What I love are the candid smiles and sense of motion. Just what I need to make me feel I'm back in a living, breathing time. Read More 

Time for a photograph at the blog, I thought: I’ll do a post on Eugène Atget. As it happens, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a show up through May 9th, Paris as Muse: Photography, 1840s–1950s, where Atget's Quai d'Anjou can be seen.

I looked at a lot of Atget's photographs  Read More 

The village of Plessis just outside Paris was the site of a restaurant built in 1848 as a tree house in honor of Swiss Family Robinson. Its popularity led to the town’s adopting the name Plessis-Robinson Meals in baskets—typically roast chicken, bread, and wine—were pulled up on ropes to customers.  Read More 

For my new novel, I’m investigating early 20th C photography and print processes. This picture of a girl asleep on a train appears Read More 

The models in some late 19th C photographs contort their bodies, demonstrating what they could do. Others flaunt their sexuality, perhaps from pride, perhaps on orders from the photographer. The weary resignation in this model's face says worlds about how hard and unglamorous the work actually was. In my novel, the model nicknamed La Grecque, has a fiery personality; but this picture influenced me very much in thinking about her. Just as actors often tell themselves back stories in order to inhabit a character more fully in performance, writers must know more about their characters than makes it to the page. Yet I have never forgotten what another novelist once told me, "I feel I must allow them some privacy, too." La Grecque froze me out, but that stubborn defense of her private self became part of what I could tell.

Fan fiction writers, do you prefer to take a minor character and go off in a new direction, or do you prefer sequels and prequels? Do you see a story here? Read More 

This photo gives an idea of how many women crowded into Rodolphe Julian's highly successful art classes, and the drawings mounted on the wall shows how good the best of them were. Notice how they are posed so that not everyone is staring straight ahead at the canera. That was a 19th C convention for group photographs. It is artificial, but it does enliven the composition—just a little prod toward the historical novelist's goal of imagining them as separate individuals, each with her own story.

For Jefferson David Chalfant's informative painting of one of the men's studios, click here.  Read More