Pictures from a Darkroom Floor
Pictures from a Darkroom Floor
Pictures from a Darkroom Floor; My Life in France gives readers a glimpse into the life of a young Canadian woman discovering herself in 1960s France, a time when you could still run into Picasso at a bullfight, Irving Penn at French Vogue or buy a house for $100 in a forgotten hamlet. Heather Cook's intimate memoir recounts her years as a young journalist who takes up modelling in Paris. Pictures from a Darkroom Floor is the story of that formative and turbulent period, as writer/model in Paris and mother/pioneer in rural southwest France where she lived in a rambling old house and lost her heart to a place and a people.
Men's and women's roles were in flux. Through an impossible relationship Cook gradually learned to rebel against the constricted expectations for women. Undaunted she dealt with the conflicts in her life as well as day-to-day challenges such as babies, divorce courts and the application of false eyelashes.
Somehow in Paris, where women were the strong sex, though they pretended otherwise, where most people were non-believers, though they pretended otherwise, somehow in Paris my situation made me fearless, she writes. I believed that as a foreigner, I was beyond the bounds of societal strictures. Everything was possible.