Women have been active in photography from its inception, although earlier histories did not fully acknowledge this. In Britain, Anna Atkins was the first to use photograms for illustrations of flora and fauna. Lady Eastlake was prominent among Victorian critics debating the nature of photography. Numerous Victorian women made photographs destined for the family album and some, such as Lady Hawarden, became renowned for the quality of their work. Julia Margaret Cameron was among the first to stage mythological scenes for photographs, as well as making portraits of eminent Victorians she knew. Many other outstanding English and Irish country house photographers were women. In Germany from 1890, increasing numbers of women were trained at the Berlin Lette-Verein's photographic school, one of the best such establishments in Europe. In North America, women such as Alice Austen, Frances Benjamin Johnston, and Jessie Tarbox Beals used the camera to explore their local communities. Others, such as Gertrude Käsebier (or, in Britain, Agnes Warburg (1872-1953) ), belonged to pictorialist groups. Many early female photographers, like their male counterparts, were amateurs in the sense that their work was not made for sale. But countless other women worked in commercial studios, usually as administrators but often as stand-in photographers or specialists in child portraiture. (As photography became increasingly industrialized by the 1870s, armies of women were employed in processing.) Some, however, like Sophia Goudstikker in Munich and Madame Yevonde in London, operated their own successful businesses. Other opportunities were also emerging. The British photojournalist Christina (Mrs Albert) Broom (1863-1939), self-styled as a press photographer, included suffragette rallies in her portfolio. The American ethnographer Mary Schaeffer (1861-1939) travelled extensively on foot and horseback documenting First Nation peoples in the Canadian Rockies. Claude Cahun, Hannah Hoech, Lotte Jacobi, and Lucia Moholy were involved in the aesthetic and political experimentation of the 1920s, and the expansion of magazine journalism and advertising in the Weimar Republic (1919-33) created many openings for women. Gisèle Freund and Germaine Krull worked in portraiture and documentary; Moholy and Freund also wrote important books on photography. Gerda Taro became a war photographer (the first of many women), and Margaret Bourke-White created the first cover picture for Life magazine. By the second half of the century, in Western societies, few if any branches of the medium remained closed to women. In Japan, too, more and more women became photographers. By the turn of the 21st century, finally, the market value of works by celebrities like Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman was fully comparable to that of men.
The feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s brought questions of gender and culture into focus. Photography histories and practices were not excepted. Broadly, three sets of concerns emerged: first, given the numbers of women photographers, questions were asked about their relative absence from the principal histories of the field. Second, in countries as far apart as North America, Britain, Germany, and Australia, there was concern to give women equal access to training and work. Third, and in a different register, questions of gender and representation were addressed, and ways in which women had been pictured came up for scrutiny. Later, attention shifted to critical analysis of imagery, and the visual imagination, in terms of gender and difference.
Absence from his-story
In 1971, the American art historian Linda Nochlin famously asked why there were no great women artists. She was one of many academics then scouring museums and archives for evidence of women's creativity. In photography, numerous exhibitions, articles, catalogues, histories, and monographs demonstrated women's participation across a range of genres. The exhibition and book Women Photographers: The Other Observers 1900 to the Present, by Val Williams (1986; reissued in 1991 as The Other Observers), surveyed the British scene. Williams emphasized the diversity of women's contribution, from documentary and reportage to experimental (art) practices; and from portraiture and family photography to the celebration and satire characteristic of feminist photography from the 1970s and 1980s. She postulated a distinctively feminine eye for detail, and a tendency to blur the boundaries between public and personal. Her study reflected a British emphasis on cultural contexts. By contrast, North American modernism influenced Constance Sullivan's more aesthetically orientated, text-centred Women Photographers (1990), which claimed enhanced status for women within the artistic canon. Identification and investigation of work by women subsequently became a burgeoning research field, especially in American universities and museums. Most comprehensively, Naomi Rosenblum's A History of Women Photographers (2nd edn. 2000) surveys and discusses women's participation in photography up till 2000, albeit with a North American emphasis. Publications and exhibitions accumulated examples of work by women and interrogated relations between subject matter, aesthetics, and gender. Uncovering histories of women's activity was intended not only to do justice to photographers previously overlooked, but also to encourage contemporary women's photography.
Putting women in the picture
The phrase ‘woman photographer’ now seems outmoded, but in the 1970s and 1980s, certainly in Britain and North America, there seemed a need to emphasize women's participation. While the term was resisted by some as belittling, for others its use was political, drawing attention to female activity while also implying distinctive styles and subject matter. A number of women-only organizations, including archives, were established as spaces for women photographers and for stories told from women's perspectives. For instance, women-only agencies not only gave some priority to women's lives in their coverage but also aimed to support female photojournalists' efforts to retain influence over the use of their pictures. Likewise, community-based photo workshops offered opportunities for women to work together to explore themes outside the dominant modes of formalist aesthetics and decisive-moment documentary. A preoccupation with the domestic, with family relations—both ‘normal’ and dysfunctional—and sexuality, typified much of the work. In the USA, for example, Donna Ferrato devoted a decade of her career to the study of domestic violence, and founded an organization dedicated to combating it. In Britain, Jo Spence worked with others at the Half Moon Photography Workshop in east London on re-interrogating the family album. (Since the advent of roll-film technology in the 1880s, middle-class women had been heavily involved in the making, preservation, and presentation of family photographs.) Emphasis was upon documenting the social and political world as experienced from a female perspective. Broader issues of class and ethnicity as related to gender and biography began to be articulated. On both sides of the Atlantic, gay and lesbian concerns were also broached. From the perspective of the 21st century it is hard to convey how radical this felt at the time. Women's lives were brought into focus in ways previously unknown, and women's work was centrally framed rather than marginalized.
Gender and representation
As John Berger remarked, in a classic formulation (in Ways of Seeing, 1972), men look at women and women conceptualize themselves as objects of the male gaze. Questions of gender and representation became central to feminist analysis and debate. The stereotyping of women in visual culture was a primary focus of attention. It was argued that women were over-commonly portrayed as mothers, as sex objects, as secretaries, as participants in activities traditionally associated with the feminine; and that this limited range of representation tended, ideologically and politically, to promote negative role modelling, limiting female ambitions and horizons and reinforcing the patriarchal status quo. For those involved in community workshops, the possibility of portraying women in more diverse and positive ways seemed all important. One method of achieving this was to run women's photography groups, to see what women would do with cameras if given the opportunity to record and comment on their own lives.
Photographic education also came up for discussion. Where traditionally theory had been concerned with the aesthetic (the specifics of photographic seeing) and the scientific (chemical processes), questions of politics and culture entered the frame. Debates related not only to subject matter, but also to modes of picturing. Psychoanalytical interpretations of patriarchy have placed the male I/eye at the centre of discourse, with woman as ‘other’: simultaneously object of desire and source of fears and insecurities for the male spectator. In a celebrated essay on cinema, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), Laura Mulvey argued that the objectification of women was reinforced through the framing look of the camera, and through identification with the viewpoint of male characters within the narrative. Victor Burgin drew upon this to analyse ‘the look’ in photography and the possibilities opened up by using psychoanalytical categories and perceptions. While others have questioned the empirical validity of these approaches (and of the theories underlying them), the resulting debates have fostered more complex understandings of image, identity, sexuality, the erotic, and the power of the gaze, especially in relation to questions of gender, class, and ethnicity.
Issues of economic relations also became involved. For instance, in 19th-century colonialism, Middle Eastern women were commonly pictured by (male) European photographers as exotic objects of fascination. Here, an interweaving of imperial mastery and the tourist gaze associated with Orientalism, coupled with women's position within Arab cultures, effected a double otherness.
What, then, shifts when women become authors of the gaze? In some genres, perhaps rather little: for example, the visual codes of documentary concede little to the maker. Elsewhere, for instance in advertising, or in gallery photography, parameters are less fixed. Women artists have variously explored new subject matter, experimented with materials, and with the effects of different methods of putting content into the picture. As the French feminist Luce Irigaray has commented (in relation to women's writing), creativity is not neutral in terms of gender and cultural experience. Likewise, there is no neutral viewing position. Post-structuralist theory called attention to the interactive nature of the act of looking; the spectator engages not passively with the picture as art object but actively with the image as a means of visual communication.
Reappraisals of women's contribution to photography postulate ways in which gender influences form, style, and subject matter; and, indeed, methods of working, including approaches to research. By the 1990s, although feminism in its classical manifestation was outmoded, many more women were active in the public sphere as photographers, artists, academics, curators, and archivists.
— Liz Wells
Bibliography
- Burgin, V., ‘Looking at Photographs’, in Thinking Photography (1982).
- Graham-Brown, S., Images of Women (1988).
- Solomon, J., and Spence, J., What Can a Woman Do with a Camera? (1995).
- Heron, L., and Williams, V., Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography (1996).
- Sturken, M., and Cartwright, L., Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (2001).
- Wells, L. (ed.), Photography: A Critical Introduction (3rd edn., 2004)
