Trigger

I’m focusing here on four books – Lewis' A Feminist History, Lederman and Yatskevich's What They Saw, Hudgins' The Gender of Photography, and Jansen's Girl on Girl – but even these few publications show that women are just as capable of producing great photographs as men, and always have been. The problem was (and still is) their work can fly under the radar. Western women working in the nineteenth century faced issues around respectability and property-owning, for example, which meant they often opened joint commercial studios under their (male) partners’ names and attributed their work to their spouses This didn’t just happen with studios. ‘Sadly, many of their collaborative books are credited only with their husbands’ names, and their contributions, if mentioned at all, are included as footnotes’, write Lederman and Yatskevich. ‘In some cases, women authors marked their works with a gender-neutral signature that used only their studio name or their first initial and last name.’^{Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich, What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 (NYC: 10x10 Photobooks, 2021), 5.}

Assumptions over women’s intellectual abilities also meant that their contributions were downplayed, as happened to Constance Fox Talbot (the first woman to take a photograph) and Gerda Taro (the radical photojournalist); women who did create large bodies of work, such as Lee Miller, somehow became better known as muses. Others, such as street photographer Vivian Maier, seem not to have pursued exhibitions or publication, working alone in obscurity. The reasons for Maier’s reticence are unknown, but presumably the obstacles and humiliations she would have faced didn’t help, and hint at the social and psychological hurdles faced by women who might have pursued professional advancement. To this day, commentary on Maier often emphasises her apparently peculiar nature – the fact that she was unmarried, sometimes ignored the children she nannied and locked herself in her room – as if these factors weren’t crucial in allowing her to work.

Seeking out these hidden examples of women photographers involves intensive research. Hudgins’ groundwork included studying unpublished graduate theses, for example, including the odd one that ‘stood by itself as a voice in what may have been a hostile wilderness at the time that it was written’; she gives thanks for what she terms ‘these instances of courageous and painstaking scholarship.’^{Nicole Hudgins, The Gender of Photography – How Masculine and Feminine Values Shaped the History of Nineteenth Century Photography (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2020), 6-7.} Despite the difficulties, what emerges from these books is the sheer wealth, breadth and scope of women’s work, from Poulomi Basu’s hard-hitting documentary images to JEB’s intimate work with lesbians, to Tabita Rezaire’s probing of black womxnhood to Hiromix’s intense vision of Japanese youth.

Perhaps because of this wealth, the authors (other than Jansen, and the Broadly Magazine editor Zing Tsjeng in Girl on Girl’s foreword) avoid speculating on the ‘female gaze’, the idea there’s a way of looking inherent to women. In fact, Lewis takes on this term, pointing out how assumptions of overarching perspectives can flatten non-Western or alternative viewpoints. ‘There is no one gaze – singular, monolithic, oppressive – but rather gazes, plural’, she states, later adding, ‘while “female gaze” can sound empowering, if it is used too bluntly it can also suggest that all women see the same way.’^{Lewis, A Feminist History, 113.} Still, as Lewis also highlights, being a woman makes a difference because it affects one’s experiences, as it always has done. ‘It is possible to identify commonalities in ideas about photography without making reductive generalizations’, she states. ‘And, arguably, it is essential to do so in order for progress to be made.’^{Lewis, A Feminist History, 13.}

As such, this ‘male gaze’ is particular, excluding men of other races, classes, sexualities and even personality types as well as women, despite having been passed off as universal. If it persists in photography – despite efforts by theorists such as Susan Sontag to unpick the medium’s problematic power relationships – then women and other so-called minorities may need to altogether rethink images and image-making. That means doing more than just filling in gaps. As Hudgins point out, there have been surveys of women’s photography before, starting with Naomi Rosenblum’s ground-breaking A History of Women Photographers, in 1994. And yet somehow, they’re still needed now. ‘Despite the impressive corpus of biographies and exhibition catalogue dedicated to the work of women photographers of all eras, the knowledge it offers has not led to real change in the format of our surveys, textbooks or museum exhibitions’, she writes. She continues:

Such accounts of photography’s history and its many uses will be improved by correcting the historical imbalance of values, not simply by adding women’s names and achievements to conventional accounts. To paraphrase Cambridge anthropologist Henrietta Moore, the “add women and stir method” will not repair a deeply-rooted bias.^{Hudgins, The Gender of Photography, 2.}

Hudgins also considers nineteenth-century women’s work with ‘dressing up’ – playing with alternative roles at home or in-studio – when pursuing alternative lifestyles, or even leaving home unchaperoned, brought heavy penalties for ‘respectable’ Western women. Understood in these terms, this work was a sophisticated reaction to these women’s lived experience (which perhaps explains its enduring popularity), as Hudgins points out. Yet its association with femininity and childhood meant it was often undervalued. Another fundamental rethink is the role of collaboration, which is still downplayed in favour of the romance of the lone artist working without assistants, printers or retouchers, leaving no room for any sense of a wider cultural milieu, to say nothing of the uncelebrated souls handling the housework and kids. Collectives and collaborations were big in the radical 1970s and have come around again now; Ariella Aisha Azoulay, Susan Meiselas, Wendy Ewald, Leigh Raiford and Laura Wexler are currently writing a book on collaborative photography.

It’s the start of an ongoing process, and Lederman and Yatskevich invite others to join the effort; both their book and the others suggest some intriguing possible directions. For example, Lewis includes a whole chapter on ‘Herstories’ (with the subtitle ‘The Family Album and the Photographic Archive’) but only features family photos which have been reworked by artists. Perhaps family photographs could also prove a rich area in their own right. Often made by women, they are also often dismissed as ‘family snaps’, of interest only to those pictured; as such they seem ripe for one of the tasks of feminism as set out by Lewis, namely ‘to make women credible and audible.’^{Lewis, A Feminist History, 9.} As Jansen writes:

We see photographs women take – even of other women – as narcissistic, shallow, easy. This confluence of meanings doesn’t benefit photographers or viewers. We often miss the nuances that reflect, in varying degrees, the photographer’s perspective of living in our times.^{Charlotte Jansen, Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2017), 9.}

It’s easy to assume that women have won many of these battles, that female photographers are now on a level playing field at least as far as gender goes; Mariama Attah writes in her essay in What They Saw that ‘hindsight and distance allow us the benefit of wondering, from the comfort of our positions of privilege, why the women didn’t try harder, work more diligently, find ways to support their dreams or overthrow systems that blocked them from achieving their fullest potentials.’^{Lederman and Yatskevich, What They Saw, 8.} But perhaps our current positions still aren’t so privileged. In the apparently liberal West, #metoo has shown that women are still regularly sexually harassed. In the UK, on average, a woman is killed by a man every three days.^{Julia Long et al., ‘Femicide Census 10-Year Report’, Femicide Census, 25 November 2020, https://www.femicidecensus.org/.} Abkhazia, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua all have total bans on abortion. In Poland and Texas, changing laws meant accessing abortion actually got harder in 2021.

As Attah points out, we continue to ask the same questions about who can pursue photography and some of those questions are gendered – Attah asking, for example, ‘how women can achieve a balance between domestic responsibilities and professional opportunities.’^{Lederman and Yatskevich, What They Saw,12}. The collage ‘Who’s still holding the baby’ still rings true, though it was created in 1978 by the Hackney Flashers collective. The UK’s first National Women’s Liberation Conference in 1974 included a call for free 24-hour nurseries in its list of crucial demands, something that now seems radical despite the fact the other three demands seem obvious, or at least worth fighting for (equal pay, equal educational and job opportunities, free contraception and abortion on demand). Given this, it’s interesting how many photographers in these books didn’t or don’t have kids. A photography that’s inhospitable to mothers is a photography that’s keeping some women out. And if it’s inhospitable to parents in general, it’s presumably also limiting fathers.

As Lewis writes in her chapter ‘On the Street: Documentary and Reportage in the “Golden Age” and Beyond’, ‘in 2020, the bylines for photo-led articles in the top news outlets ranged from a dismal 6.4 percent (Le Monde and The Guardian) to a could-do-better 35.7 percent in the San Francisco Chronicle.’^{Lewis, A Feminist History, 67-68.} There are many reasons for these numbers, leaving aside the fact that documentary and reportage is a particularly macho field. Even so, these figures stink. Lewis’ book and the other books I’ve considered here are brilliant, fascinating, glorious testimonies to the images made by women. Hopefully there’s now enough critical mass to ensure they’re part of a wider cultural and social shift; if not, in future there will still be gaps.