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A review by sbsterling
The Light Room by Kate Zambreno
2.0
2.5 stars. I really wanted to like this so much and I just... didn't. I just couldn't connect the way I did with Drifts. She tries to make reference to the lack of equity in education but it just isn't enough to counter the endless references to victorian children or her baby as peak renaissance baby and her daughter's blue eyes.
I just thought it was all a bit weird. It's possible this was by design, it's just her musings. But when she wonders if "innocence and beauty-- idealized narrowly within a certain class, white and wealthy-- and whether these ideas still influence how young children are photographed." I just have to question if she really wonders that?
There is something to love in reading such an intimate depiction of private domestic life, in making the unseen seen but that's where it ends for me. So many of the references to artists documenting time, the home, their internal life, were men and white. Maybe it was meant to be a juxtaposition but she never talks about it.
There is certainly some overlap on the venn diagram with Camille Dungy's Soil but for me it's a much more current and relevant look at where we are today. I was also this person once with the peg dolls reading Little House on the Prairie, but I'm not any more.
I wanted it to be more intersectional.
I just thought it was all a bit weird. It's possible this was by design, it's just her musings. But when she wonders if "innocence and beauty-- idealized narrowly within a certain class, white and wealthy-- and whether these ideas still influence how young children are photographed." I just have to question if she really wonders that?
There is something to love in reading such an intimate depiction of private domestic life, in making the unseen seen but that's where it ends for me. So many of the references to artists documenting time, the home, their internal life, were men and white. Maybe it was meant to be a juxtaposition but she never talks about it.
There is certainly some overlap on the venn diagram with Camille Dungy's Soil but for me it's a much more current and relevant look at where we are today. I was also this person once with the peg dolls reading Little House on the Prairie, but I'm not any more.
I wanted it to be more intersectional.