A History of Women Photographers
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
A History of Women Photographers Details
Review "Landmark volume... a seminal reference work... brings to light a largely unknown world in vivid originality and broad archival conception." —Publishers Weekly “The definitive book on the subject.” —The Wall Street Journal "Rich in revelation and discoveries." —Art New England "There are surprises in every chapter of this well-written history, and the supporting material... is equally valuable." —Chicago Tribune "A ‘must’ acquisition.” —Choice Magazine "This volume is a remarkable resource and a wonderful work of art...In all, an unaccustomed luxury of quantity and quality." —The Art Book Read more About the Author Naomi Rosenblum, an independent curator and scholar who has written many articles and lectured extensively on a wide range of subjects in photography, first published A World History of Photography (now in its fourth edition) in 1984. This is the second revision of her 1994 book, the award-winning A History of Women Photographers. She lives in Long Island City, New York. Read more Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTION Why Women? Women have been actively involved with photography ever since the medium was first introduced in 1839. They were drawn to it professionally and personally, finding it an effective means both to earn a living and to express ideas and feelings. An easily achieved skill adaptable to a wide variety of uses, photography offered women a more congenial discipline than the traditional visual arts of painting and sculpture. The barriers to their participation in photography were lower, and recognition often came faster than in the other arts. If women had fared comparatively well in photography, why do they merit a separate study? And why is it now necessary to revise and update this study, which first appeared in 1994, for a third edition? There are several answers to these questions and several more questions to ask. Have women and their photographs been as visible as they should be in view of their numbers and past influence? Have inquiries into their activities and their art been as rigorous and as insightful as the studies of their male colleagues? Have their contributions been understood in the context of the medium’s overall development? And how has the situation changed over the past few decades? Research suggests that until fairly recent times women’s work in photography did not receive its due consideration. Because the selection of what shall be remembered had been done throughout most of photographic history by male scholars, women tended to be dismissed or slighted. This process obscured significant contributions by some once well known individuals, and it ignored entirely those who never made it into the spotlight. In 1958, for example, no women were named by leaders in the field of photography as among the “10 greatest photographers.” Women were never mentioned in connection with the prehistory of photography, although a Chinese woman scientist, Huang Lu, is said to have added a lens to the camera obscura in the early nineteenth century, and the German painter Friederike Wilhelmine von Wunsch announced a process of making portraits with light-sensitive materials in early 1839. And images created by women or jointly by spousal teams are sometimes transformed by history into the work of a male only, as happened in the case of Rogi Andre, Harriet and Robert Christopher Tytler, and Carolyn and Edwin Gledhill. Women were consistently scanted in the general histories of the medium from which most people gained their knowledge of photography’s development. For instance, Beaumont Newhall’s 1982 revision of his influential History of Photography from 1839 to Present Day lists fourteen women—three more than Newell’s 1964 revision, which had two fewer than the original 1949 edition. In Masterpieces of Photography, a 1986 compendium of highlights from the George Eastman House collection, 8 of the 194 photographers were women; this imbalance has been redressed somewhat in that institution’s latest catalog, which includes 39 women among approximately 300 photographers; that is, about 13 percent. In two of the publications that appeared in 1989 to mark 150 years of photography—Mike Weaver’s Art of Photography, 1839–1989 and John Szarkowski’s summation, Photography until Now, women constitute fewer than 10 percent of those included. Representation has improved in Nouvelle Histoire de la Photographie (The New History of Photography), edited by Michel Frizot, which appeared first in France in 1994. This compendium of essays makes reference to some 60 women and its bibliography includes work by 23. Granted, these histories and surveys embrace the entire span of photography, including the beginning years when women were not as active as they would later become, but works dealing with the twentieth century have also neglected women. A 1950 summary of American work, entitled Photography at Mid-Century, included just 28 women among 225 men, or a little more than 12 percent. A signal improvement on these figures can be seen in a 1999 publication based on the Hallmark Collection; An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital, by Keith Davis, indexes about 100 women, with illustrations by some 80. Another bias is revealed by way women’s contributions have been handled in text and illustrations in the historical and critical literature. In American Photography (1984), Jonathan Green’s discussion of trends in the medium since 1945, 45 women photographers are mentioned but merit only 27 reproductions compared to 245 by 195 men. The work of Walker Evans, for example, warrants eleven illustrations and forty-four text references compared to one reproduction of and four references to that of Dorothea Lange. More recently, in recognition of Lange’s “enormous influence on photographers,” An American Century of Photography gives Evans and Lange four illustrations each and fairly equal text space. In the past, women seemed nearly invisible in photographic criticism and theory; even the compendia of writings that appeared during the 1970s and 1980s included work by few women photographers and theorists. They are surprisingly underrepresented in the reams of critical writing about photography that took place in Europe during the 1920s and early 1930s, although as the German photojournalist Ilse Bing noted, “many women participated in the creation of modern photography.” Particularly in Europe, the inaccessibility of their writings and of much of their work made it difficult until fairly recently to even begin to evaluate the extent and quality of women’s contributions to the modernist era. In terms of collecting and exhibiting by women, the record at the Museum of Modern Art is revealing and fairly typical. In 1940 this institution became the first major art museum in the United States (as differentiated from those specializing in historical materials) to set up a photography department; a half century or so later 72 women were represented among a total of 1,226 individuals—not quite 6 percent. Writing in 1973 in Looking at Photographs (in which 13 of the 100 examples from MoMA’s collection are by women), John Szarkowski commended himself on this representation, claiming that it was “surely larger than that of women among those seriously committed to photography.” This despite the fact that almost as many women as men were graduating from art and professional schools with advanced degrees in photography and that photography-industry statistics counted almost as many women camera users as men. MoMA’s exhibition record has been brighter: of the seventy one-person photography shows held there between 1943 and 1990, 28 percent of their acquisitions and purchases, and women have been given half as many one-person exhibitions as men. The effects of similar imbalances in acquisitions and exhibitions at other museums were reflected in the commercial market, which had expanded substantially by 1990. One result of museum’s preference for work by male photographers was that private collectors were more eager to collect men’s work. Prices, too, were inequitable: on average, work by men yielded about 50 to 60 percent more than that by women. Since 1996 this has changed, and prices appear to have equalized, in part because of the active market for “art” photographs and in part because of greater awareness of photography by women. Prices now seem to relate more to the quality and scarcity of an individual image than to any other factor. Mention should also be made of collections of women’s work that have been made during the past two decades and of the archive started by Peter Palmquist, which now comprises nearly eleven thousand examples of work by women photographers. Read more
Reviews
If you're a photographer - at any level - with an interest in the women who made their mark in this field, this is a book you'll enjoy having in your personal library. There were many women photographers over-looked for too long, it's time for them to get their due respect
