The history of photography has made it clear that the camera is a subjective tool. The glass lens frames the story differently depending on who is doing the looking, and how. So what are we to make of the images of a woman in a glass house, the history of which has been obscured by a patriarchal culture’s short-sighted view?In her book Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth (2025), essayist, artist, and architect Nora Wendl “explodes the sex-and-real-estate myth” of the iconic Edith Farnsworth House, designed by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the eponymous physician. The book’s so-called explosion happens in slow motion, page by page, not only through Farnsworth’s archives, papers, and poems but also through Wendl’s writing and photographs, including her own constructed images that are not always distinguishable from the archival ones.Nora Wendl, “Edith Farnsworth House Terrace” (2006), C-print (image courtesy Nora Wendl)Throughout her more than 10 years of research, Wendl repeatedly comes up against the belief that Farnsworth was in love with Mies van der Rohe, and that when their affair was over, she plotted to sue him and ruin his reputation. But, in fact, the story goes like this. Between 1949 and 1951, Mies van der Rohe designed a glass house for Edith Farnsworth on Fox River in rural Illinois. He sued her for fees they never agreed to, and she countersued him because of the ever-increasing costs of the runaway project. In 1956, a judge ruled that the two must settle. So, Wendl asks us: “What makes a woman believable?”Unidentified woman, likely Swiss-American pianist Jenny Geering, at the Farnsworth House around 1954 (image courtesy Newberry Library and Farnsworth family)The author’s voice is piercing, sharpened by her commitment to correct or at least reframe existing accounts of Farnsworth’s life. In the vein of archivist Jenn Shapland’s memoir My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (2020), which illuminates the titular writer’s queerness, Wendl draws attention to gaps and silences that signal the presence of other things, other people, and other ways of being. Tracing Farnsworth’s life, Wendl grants us glimpses into her own as she chronicles her move from Chicago to the deserts of New Mexico, leaves one job for another, and slips between worlds, at times undetected and at others exposed. The parallels between the two women’s lives mirror those of countless others: deflecting the advances and insults of men, defending their own desires and experiences, determining their own identities and fates. I found myself deeply interested in Wendl’s embodied visual interpretations of Farnsworth’s life, artworks in themselves. In her photograph titled “I Listened” (2017), Wendl portrays herself in the glass house, “breathing in and out death” while lying on a bed that served as a stand-in for Farnsworth’s own (the house had been staged for public tours). The image plays on ambiguity and visibility: blue disposable shoe covers, a conservative 1940s black dress, the mattress conforming to the weight of Wendl’s body that is visible only from the knees down, hands clasped on her belly, the curtains drawn just so, the entire composition viewed through a glass wall.Edith Farnsworth (right) with Beth Dunlap (left), her patient and the wife of William Dunlap, who designed the house’s screens and wardrobe, sitting on the steps of the house around 1951 (photograph by William Dunlap)Wendl is well aware that philosophers have long written about houses as psychological spaces. “Researching a woman who would build a glass house for herself is a particular kind of being alone,” she writes. Her descriptions of the house, informed by Farnsworth’s archives, speak of suffocation and saving one’s own life: “Lighting a fire in the hearth in the hermetically sealed house caused interior negative pressure — the outside air moved in, blowing out the fire. To keep the fire burning, she opened the door.”History, like glass, is difficult to see. It is always, slowly, moving and tricking the eye. Wendl’s account of Farnsworth, and of herself, offers an architectural blueprint for women everywhere: “to reject the structures handed to them, to build new ones.” Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth (2025) by Nora Wendl is published by 3 Fields Books and is available online and through independent booksellers.