Free Eight Girls Taking Pictures by Whitney Otto

isn’t beautiful. It is too much like life,” said Miss Charles, punctuating the end of their conversation by handing Amadora Chang’s leash.
     • • • 
    It was called The Works, and it was where Amadora asked Lallie Charles to send her after a year spent arranging pink silk roses, pink silk draperies, pink velvet chairs. By this time Miss Charles had three other assistantsdoing what Amadora was doing, with the exception of walking Chang, who behaved as if Amadora belonged to him. The Works was the place where Miss Charles sent her negatives to be “improved”; Amadora made her case not just that she wanted to expand her photographic education but that Miss Charles would benefit from her new skills when she returned to complete the third year of her apprenticeship.
    Lallie Charles was always a soft touch.
     • • • 
    Amadora explained to her parents one evening, her father rapt, her mother less so:
    “It’s called The Works, and you can all but invent people. A retoucher rids the sitter of all manner of physical imperfection: jowls, thick ankles, unfortunate jaws, and midsections. Bodies become svelte and young again. Then the retoucher—which will now be me—applies a liquid known as ‘medium,’ picks up a pencil, and all wrinkles, lines, and other blemishes disappear!”
    “Perhaps I’ll come by your ‘Works,’ ” said her father.
    “Please no,” said Amadora. “I love you as you are.”
    “I’d rather be as I was.”
    “That’s the rub, you see. One must be very skilled when erasing warts and moles and furrows or you will be as you never were. Utterly unrecognizable.”
    “Dorrie,” said her mother, “this erasing will be your new work? Won’t you tire of it?”
    “Once I master retouching, I shall be sent on to learn trimming, mounting, finishing, and spotting.”
    “Finishing?” asked her mother.
    “A sharp knife applied to the mouth can make the sitter a villian, a sensualist, or a nun. Eyes can be darkened, made expressive, given the look of someone keeping a secret, or holding back a laugh, or tears. One can resemble a poet. Anything can be made bigger or smaller, happy or thoughtful, straightened or softened. Eyelashes, eyebrows, hairlines, nose hair, chin hair.”
    “And how do you work this alchemy?” asked her father.
    “With a sharp knife, a paintbrush, watercolors, pumice powder, gum, and chalks.”
    “I’m a bit concerned about your knowing the look of a sensualist,” said her mother.
    Her father said, “This is where you want to work?”
    “Without a doubt,” answered Amadora.
     • • • 
    Amadora was happier at The Works than she had ever been at Lallie Charles’s studio. There was so much to learn, so much to master, whereas the studio was just more of the same—the same society ladies, with the same ladies’ maids who helped them in and out of the same structured, intricate, corseted clothing. The same pose by the lattice window. The same pink glow.
    It wasn’t that Amadora thought less of the photographer; as theatrically eccentric as she could be, Lallie Charles was dedicated to her art, which, in turn, defined something of an era. But Amadora, not even out of her teens, was too young for nostalgia. She had all kinds of electric dreams propelling her forward. The ennui she had experienced when she returned from Paris (before her time with Miss Charles) was again upon her during her time with the photographer.
    Even more disturbingly, before she left Lallie Charles’s studio, Amadora sometimes searched for the haughty, handsome young man from the park. She worked for a woman, worked with three other female assistants much like herself, and the clients, with their maids, were nearly all women. No wonder, she said to herself, that I should be thinking about a man like that. He wasn’t even nice.
     • • • 
    “Girls,” said Lallie Charles to Amadora and the three other assistants, “changes afoot!”
    The four young women held