What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 (Nueva York, 10×10 Photobooks, 2021) cover images Design: Ayumi Higuchi Photography: Jeff Gutterman
A mid-week posting!
I wouldn’t have forgiven myself if I had missed this important exhibition about an interesting subject, the “underexposed and undocumented photobooks by women made between 1843 and 1999.”
So I thought I would squeeze it into the posting schedule which stretches a couple of months into the future…
Other than the group photographs of the book covers and installation photographs of the exhibition (below), there were no individual book covers nor details about some of the books in the media images, so I have added a few were it has been possible along with accompanying text.
I have also included photographs from what I think is one of the most iconic photobooks, even though I am not sure it is in the exhibition: Marion Palfi’s There is No More Time: An American Tragedy (1949).
So many important photobooks by so many glorious photographers.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 (Nueva York, 10×10 Photobooks, 2021) cover images (detail) Design: Ayumi Higuchi Photography: Jeff Gutterman
What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 (Nueva York, 10×10 Photobooks, 2021) cover images (detail) Design: Ayumi Higuchi Photography: Jeff Gutterman
What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 (Nueva York, 10×10 Photobooks, 2021) cover images (detail) Design: Ayumi Higuchi Photography: Jeff Gutterman
What They Saw project, a touring exhibition accompanied by a publication and series of public programs, is a means to ignite interest in underexposed and undocumented photobooks by women made between 1843 and 1999 and to begin a process of filling in the gaps. The present show is organised in collaboration with 10×10 Photobooks, a nonprofit organisation with a mission to share photobooks globally and encourage their appreciation and understanding.
In seeking out the omissions in photobook history, the standard definition of the photobook: a bound volume with photographic illustrations published by the author, an independent publisher or a commercial publisher, needed to be expanded to incorporate those who do not call themselves photographers or artists but who nevertheless put together a “book” composed of photographs taken by themselves or others: individual albums, slim exhibition pamphlets, scrapbooks, mock-ups, fanzines and artists’ books to be more inclusive.
This iteration of the What They Saw exhibition includes 60 books of the more than 250 volumes highlighted in the associated publication. Most of these publications are from the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre. They are presented chronologically and show examples of books from around the globe. From the pioneers, such as Anna Atkins, who was the first person ever to print and distribute a photobook, or Isabel Agnes Cowper, who used photography to document museum objects, subsequently reproduced in numerous books, to the independent and self-published photobooks of the 1990s, including Colored People: A Collaborative Book Project by Adrian Piper or Twinspotting by Ketaki Seth, this selection allows for greater inclusion of previously marginalised photographic communities, including women, queer communities, people of colour and artists from outside Europe and North America.
Although only twenty-five years old, photobook history has been written primarily by men and has focused on publications authored by men. Very few books by women photographers appear in past anthologies documenting photobook history, and those included are already quite well known. This exhibition of women’s role in the production, dissemination, and authoring of photobooks is a necessary step in unwriting the current photobook history and rewriting an updated photobook history that is more equitable and inclusive.
Text from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía website
Anna Atkins, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1843
Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob) (French, 1894-1954) Aveux non avenus (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) 1930
In her 1930 publication, Aveux non Avenus, Claude Cahun used the relationship between her inwardly focused poetic writing and symbolic photomontages to construct a unique reality for self-expression. This article focuses on three chapters and respective photographic images from the publication to relate Cahun’s, and by association her partner Marcel Moore’s, discussion on sexuality and gender expression. The utopian dreamscape created investigates issues of narcissism and otherness, female homosexuality, dandyism and going beyond gender, individual and social critique, mocking the antiquated views of art and writing, accepting and breaking taboos, while allowing for other departures from the accepted norm. Through analysis of the publication and supporting evidence from early influences, it can be seen that Cahun created a world in Aveux non Avenus where she could exist in a space between the established feminine–masculine binary of 20th-century Europe.
Germaine Krull (photographer) Cover design by M. Tchimoukow. MÉTAL cover 1928
Germaine Krull (1897-1985) Image from the portfolio MÉTAL 1928, p. 33
I did not have a special intention or design when I took the Iron photographs. I wanted to show what I see, exactly as the eye sees it. ‘MÉTAL’ is a collection of photographs from the time. ‘MÉTAL’ initiated a new visual era and open the way or a new concept of photography. ‘MÉTAL’ was the starting point which allowed photography to become an artisanal trade and which made an artist of the photographer, because it was part of this new movement, of this new era which touched all art.
Germaine Krull. Extract from the Preface to the 1976 edition of ‘MÉTAL’
Germaine Krull (1897-1985) Image from the portfolio MÉTAL 1928 p. 37
Eyes on Russia by Margaret Bourke-White. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931
In 1951, Westbrook Pegler wrote numerous articles attacking Margaret Bourke-White for her associations with leftist politics in the 1930s. It is probably for this reason that in her autobiography, Portrait of Myself, written about ten years later, Bourke-White didn’t mention her first book, Eyes on Russia, published in 1931. And yet, this book is of extraordinary interest, not only as a landmark in Bourke-White’s career but also as a source, both visual and narrative, on the Soviet Union during its first Five Year Plan. With letters of recommendation from influential people, including the Russian film maker, Sergei Eisenstein, Bourke-White arrived in Moscow in the fall of 1930, where she obtained the official endorsement of A.B. Khalatoff, chief of the Soviet publishing house (he was later liquidated in the 1937 purges). Khalatoff supplied her with a thick roll of rubles and a guide. Bourke-White then toured some of the most important industrial and other sites and came back with stellar images of Russia under construction, which she complemented by a spritely and charming narrative of her experiences as the first foreign photographer to photograph in the Soviet Union with official permission. On her trip, she made 800 negatives, of which 40 were published in Eyes on Russia in a sepia tone. This book, along with at least eight related illustrated articles in Fortune, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and other periodicals, significantly enhanced Bourke-White’s reputation (and commercial business). They also helped initiate relationships she established both with Soviet officials and Americans sympathetic to the U.S.S.R. She returned to Russia in 1931 and 1932 for additional photography, but Eyes on Russia, a fascinating book for a variety of reasons, remains the largest single published collection of her work in that country. It was very well received in numerous book reviews when it appeared. For a more detailed review, see my article, Gary D. Saretzky “Margaret Bourke-White: Eyes on Russia,” The Photo Review, 22: 3-4 (Summer & Fall 1999),
Text from a comment on the Amazon website
Roll, Jordan, Roll by Julia Peterkin (text) and Doris Ulmann (photographs) New York: Robert O. Ballo, 1933
Doris Ulmann’s photographic collaboration with Julia Peterkin focuses on the lives of former slaves and their descendants on a plantation in the Gullah coastal region of South Carolina. Peterkin, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929, was born in South Carolina and raised by a black nursemaid who taught her the Gullah dialect before she learned standard English. She married the heir to Lang Syne in today’s Calhoun County, SC, one of the state’s richest plantations, which became the setting for Roll, Jordan, Roll. Ulmann’s soft-focus photos-rendered as tactile as charcoal drawings in the superb gravure reproductions here-straddle Pictorialism and Modernism even as they appear to dissolve into memory.
Text from the Amazon website
Leni Riefenstahl Schönheit im olympischen Kampf [Beauty in the Olympic Games] Berlin: Im Deutschen Verlag, (1937)
Leni Riefenstahl Schönheit im olympischen Kampf [Beauty in the Olympic Games] Berlin: Im Deutschen Verlag, (1937) pp. 220-221
Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland. Changing New York. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1939
“The camera alone can catch
the swift surfaces of the
cities today and speaks a
language intelligible to all.”
~ Berenice Abbott
Abbott’s landmark work on New York, illustrated with 97 halftone plates that display “the historical importance of the documentary model its power as a medium of personal expression” (Parr & Badger).
In January 1929, after eight years in Europe, Abbott boarded an ocean liner to New York City for what was meant to be a short visit. Upon arrival, she was struck by the rapid transformation of the built landscape and saw the city as ripe with photographic potential. “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life,” she recalled. “Old New York is fast disappearing,” Abbott observed. “At almost any point on Manhattan Island, the sweep of one’s vision can take in the dramatic contrasts of the old and the new and the bold foreshadowing of the future. This dynamic quality should be caught and recorded immediately in a documentary interpretation of New York City. The city is in the making and unless this transition is crystallised now in permanent form, it will be forever lost…. The camera alone can catch the swift surfaces of the cities today and speaks a language intelligible to all.”
On the eve of the Great Depression, she began a series of documentary photographs of the city that, with the support of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1939, debuted in 1939 as the traveling exhibition and publication Changing New York.
With a handheld camera, Abbott traversed the city, photographing its skyscrapers, bridges, elevated trains, and neighbourhood street life. She pasted these “tiny photographic notes” into a standard black-page album, arranging them by subject and locale.
Consisting of 266 small black-and-white prints arranged on thirty-two pages, Abbott’s New York album marks a key turning point in her career – from her portrait work in Paris to the urban documentation that became one of her lasting legacies.
From 1935 to 1965, Berenice Abbott and art critic Elizabeth McCausland (1899-1965) lived and worked in two flats they shared on the fourth floor of the loft building at 50 Commerce Street.
Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland. Changing New York. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1939
An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. Photographs by Dorothea Lange; text by Paul Taylor. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939
“We need to be reminded these days about what women have been, and can be. It’s a question of their really deep and fundamental place in society. I have a feeling that women need to be reminded of it. They are needed.”
~ Dorothea Lange
First published in 1939, An American Exodus is one of the masterpieces of the documentary genre. Produced by incomparable documentary photographer Dorothea Lange with text by her husband, Paul Taylor, An American Exodus was taken in the early 1930s while the couple were working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) The book documents the rural poverty of the depression-era exodus that brought over 300,000 migrants to California in search of farm work, a westward mass migration driven by economic deprivation as opposed to the Manifest Destiny of 19th century pioneers.
Text from the Google Books website
In 1938, Dorothea Lange and her husband Paul Taylor began sorting through the stacks of photographs she had made documenting migrant farmworkers and homeless drought refugees. Their goal was to create a book that would reveal the human dimension of the crisis to the American people and, hopefully, prompt government relief. One of several books released in the late 1930s that made use of the Farm Security Administration photo archive, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion was innovative in several ways. Rather than tell the story from their own perspective, Lange and Taylor used direct quotes from the migrants themselves, which Lange had painstakingly collected in the field. Released as war tensions were building in Europe and Asia, An American Exodus was largely overlooked at the time. In the years since its publication, the book has gained power, presenting an iconic image of the Dust Bowl era that has shaped the way we think of those difficult years.
Text from the Dorothea Lange Digital Archive, Oakland Museum of California website
Eslanda Goode Robeson. African Journey. New York: John Day Company, 1945
Eslanda Robeson’s 1936 African journal with her own photographs. Africa seen through the eyes of an African American. She went to South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, and Congo, and visited African kings and British governors, villages, gold mines, plantations, herdswomen, and modern African leaders.
Eslanda Goode Robeson (1895-1965) was an American anthropologist, author, actress, and civil rights activist. She was born in Washington, D.C., graduated from Columbia University in 1917 with a degree in chemistry, and in 1921 married the singer and actor Paul Robeson. In 1936, she received her degree in anthropology from the London School of Economics, and in 1946, the year following the publication of African Journal, earned her anthropology Ph.D. from Hartford Seminary where she specialised in African studies and race relations.
Text from the Boyd Books website
Wrens in Camera by Lee Miller (London: Hollis and Carter, 1945)
During the Second World War Lee Miller was the official war photographer for Vogue magazine. The images contained in Wrens in Camera were commissioned by the Admiralty and show the female navy officers and workers fulfilling their war duties. There are signallers, technicians, trainers, housekeepers and transport crews. The whole is an important document of women’s roles in war-time Britain.
Text from the Beaux Books website
Wrens in Camera by Lee Miller (London: Hollis and Carter, 1945) p. 47
“As a photographer, she was as interested in the discriminator as in the victims of discrimination. Long before what we tend to think of as the crux of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, Palfi went to Georgia at a particularly dangerous time. In 1949, she was drawn to do an in-depth portrait of Irwinton, a small community where a young black man had been torn out of jail and shot by a lynch mob. The tremendous public outcry over this barbaric incident included front-page coverage and editorials by the New York Times. Obviously, the presence of a photographer in such a community would attract unwanted attention and might have endangered her life. But by a happy stroke of luck, the Vice-President of the Georgia Power Company was interested in her work. Warning her that she must “photograph the South as it really is, not as the North slanders it,” he wanted her to get to meet the “right” people. As it happened, the “right” people turned out to be the very discriminators she wanted to photograph. Left in the protection of the local postmistress, she proceeded to take terms, objective pictures of overseers and white-suited politicians.
Even if the press had not indicted Irwinton for its racism, the extreme conservatism and tension were evident in the faces of its citizens. She found a white supremacist group, “The Columbians,” whose insignia was a thunderbolt, the symbol of Hitler’s elite guard. “Mein Kampf was their bible,” she believed. Meanwhile, the wife of the lunch victim said, simply, “Caleb was a good man … he believed in his rights and therefore he died.”
Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock. “Marion Palfi: An Appreciation,” in The Archive Research Series Number 19, September 1983, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, pp. 7-8.
Acapulco en el sueño by Francisco Tario (text) with photographs by Lola Alvarez Bravo, 1951
“If my photographs have any meaning, it’s that they stand for a Mexico that once existed.”
~ Lola Alvarez Bravo
Dare Wright. The Lonely Doll. New York: Doubleday & Co, 1957
Once there was a little doll. Her name was Edith. She lived in a nice house and had everything she needed except someone to play with. She was lonely! Then one morning Edith looked into the garden and there stood two bears! Since it was first published in 1957, The Lonely Doll has established itself as a unique children’s classic. Through innovative photography Dare Wright brings the world of dolls to life and entertains us with much more than just a story. Edith, the star of the show, is a doll from Wright’s childhood, and Wright selected the bear family with the help of her brother. With simple poses and wonderful expressions, the cast of characters is vividly brought to life to tell a story of friendship.
Mourka, the autobiography of a Cat, by Tanaquil Le Clercq and Martha Swope. Stein and Day 1964
Le Clercq is the wife of choreographer George Balanchine; she wrote this book after Mourka became famous because of the photograph of Martha Swope in Life magazine, where George Balanchine assists Mourka in his grand jeté. Mourka writes about his exercises in dance and his aspirations to travel in outer space.
Text from the Cats in Books albums Facebook page
Mourka, the autobiography of a Cat, by Tanaquil Le Clercq and Martha Swope. Stein and Day 1964
A Way of Seeing, 1965. Photographs by Helen Levitt
Dublin: A Portrait by V.S. Pritchett (text) and Evelyn Hofer (photographs). New York: Harper & Row, 1967
The starting point for this book is Evelin Hofer’s Dublin: A Portrait, which features an in-depth essay by V. S. Pritchett and photos by Hofer, and enjoyed great popularity upon its original publication in 1967. Dublin: A Portrait is an example of Hofer’s perhaps most important body of work, her city portraits: books that present comprehensive prose texts by renowned authors alongside her self-contained visual essays with their own narratives. Dublin: A Portrait was the last book published in this renowned series. …
In Dublin Hofer repeatedly turned her camera to sights of the city, but mainly to the people who constituted its essence. She made numerous portraits – be they of writers and public figures or unknown people in the streets. Her portraits give evidence of an intense, respectful engagement with her subjects, who participate as equal partners in the process of photographing.
When Diane Arbus died in 1971 at the age of forty-eight, she was already a significant influence-even something of a legend-among serious photographers, although only a relatively small number of her most important pictures were widely known at the time. The publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph in 1972 – along with the posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art – offered the general public its first encounter with the breadth and power of her achievements. The response was unprecedented.
The monograph of eighty photographs was edited and designed by the painter Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus’s friend and colleague, and by her daughter Doon Arbus. Their goal in making the book was to remain as faithful as possible to the standards by which Diane Arbus judged her own work and to the ways in which she hoped it would be seen. Universally acknowledged as a classic, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph is a timeless masterpiece with editions in five languages and remains the foundation of her international reputation.
Nearly half of a century has done nothing to diminish the riveting impact of these pictures or the controversy they inspire. Arbus’s photographs penetrate the psyche with all the force of a personal encounter and, in doing so, transform the way we see the world and the people in it.
Jill Freedman. Circus Days. New York: Harmony Books/Crown, 1975
A photographic documentation of the Beatty-Cole Circus, recording and portraying the customs, activities, animals, and singular personalities of an endangered way of life.
Jill Freedman. Circus Days. New York: Harmony Books/Crown, 1975
Susan Meiselas. Carnival Strippers book cover 1975
From 1972 to 1975, Susan Meiselas spent her summers photographing women who performed striptease for small-town carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. As she followed the shows from town to town, she captured the dancers on stage and off, their public performances as well as their private lives, creating a portrait both documentary and empathetic: “The recognition of this world is not the invention of it. I wanted to present an account of the girl show that portrayed what I saw and revealed how the people involved felt about what they were doing.” Meiselas also taped candid interviews with the dancers, their boyfriends, the show managers and paying customers, which form a crucial part of the book.
Meiselas’ frank description of these women brought a hidden world to public attention, and explored the complex role the carnival played in their lives: mobility, money and liberation, but also undeniable objectification and exploitation. Produced during the early years of the women’s movement, Carnival Strippers reflects the struggle for identity and self-esteem that characterised a complex era of change.
Text from the Booktopia website [Online] Cited 22/04/2022
Claudia Andujar, Amazônia, 1978
Since the early 1970s, Claudia Andujar has been committed to the cause of the Yanomami Indians living in the heart of the Amazon rainforest and is the author of the most important photographic work dedicated to them to date. A founding member of the Brazilian NGO Comissão Pró Yanomami (CCPY), the photographer has played a fundamental role in the recognition of their territory by the Brazilian government. …
Claudia Andujar first met the Yanomami in 1971 while working on an article about the Amazon for Realidade magazine. Fascinated by the culture of this isolated community, she decided to embark on an in-depth photographic essay on their daily life after receiving a Guggenheim fellowship to support the project. From the very beginning, her approach differed greatly from the straightforward documentary style of her contemporaries. The photographs she made during this period show how she experimented with a variety of photographic techniques in an attempt to visually translate the shamanic culture of the Yanomami. Applying Vaseline to the lens of her camera, using flash devices, oil lamps and infrared film, she created visual distortions, streaks of light and saturated colors, thus imbuing her images with a feeling of the otherworldly.
Cover image of Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians (1979). Photographs by JEB (Joan E. Biren)
In 1979, JEB (Joan E. Biren) self-published her first book, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians. Revolutionary at that time, JEB made photographs of lesbians from different ages and backgrounds in their everyday lives-working, playing, raising families, and striving to remake their worlds. The photographs were accompanied by testimonials from the women pictured in the book, as well as writings from icons including Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and a foreword from Joan Nestle. Eye to Eye signalled a radical new way of seeing – moving lesbian lives from the margins to the centre, and reversing a history of invisibility. More than just a book, it was an affirmation of the existence of lesbians that helped to propel a political movement. Reprinted for the first time in forty years and featuring new essays from photographer Lola Flash and former soccer player Lori Lindsey, Eye to Eye is a faithful reproduction of a work that continues to resonate in the queer community and beyond.
Text from the Amazon website
Jo Spence. Putting Myself In The Picture: A Political, Personal, and Photographic Autobiography. London: Camden Press Ltd, 1986
Photographer Jo Spence challenges the assumptions of conventional photography in this groundbreaking visual autobiography, which traces her journey from self-censorship to self-healing.
Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1986
Cristina García Rodero. España Oculta. 1989
When Spanish photographer Cristina Garcia Rodero went to study art in Italy, in 1973, she fully understood the importance of home. Yet her time abroad formented a deeper interest in was happening in her own country and, as a result, at the age of 23, Garcia Rodero returned to Spain and started a project that she hoped would capture the essence of the myriad Spanish traditions, religious practices and rites that were already fading away. What started as a five-year project ended up lasting 15 years and came to be the book España Oculta (Hidden Spain) published in 1989. At 39 years old, Garcia Rodero had managed to compile a kind of anthropological encyclopedia of her country. The work also captured a key moment in Spain’s history – with Spanish dictator Franco dying in 1975, and the country commencing a period of transition – something that would come to have a huge effect on the way the nation’s cultural traditions and rites were experienced and performed from then on.
Text from the Google Books website
Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. The MIT Press & The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999
This is the most comprehensive publication ever produced on the work of American artist Barbara Kruger. Kruger, one of the most influential artists of the last three decades, uses pictures and words through a wide variety of media and sites to raise issues of power, sexuality, and representation. Her works include photographic prints on paper and vinyl, etched metal plates, sculpture, video, installations, billboards, posters, magazine and book covers, T-shirts, shopping bags, postcards, and newspaper op-ed pieces.
This book serves as the catalog for the first major one-person exhibition of Kruger’s work to be mounted in the United States. The book, designed by Lorraine Wild in collaboration with the artist, contains texts by Rosalyn Deutsche, Katherine Dieckmann, Ann Goldstein, Steven Heller, Gary Indiana, Carol Squiers, and Lynne Tillman on subjects associated with Kruger’s work, including photography, graphic design, public space, power, and representation, as well as an extensive exhibition history, bibliography, and checklist of the exhibition. The cover features a new piece by Kruger, entitled Thinking of You, created especially for the catalog.
Text from the Amazon website
Graciela Iturbide. Juchitán de las Mujeres. Mexico: Ediciones Toledo, 1991
In 1979 Graciela Iturbide took a series of photographs of the Zapotec culture, published as Juchitán de la mujeres. This is certainly the best known of all her works. It is the result of ten years of work, numerous trips to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and a prolonged experience of living among its inhabitants. None of the subjects of these photographs was captured candidly; all were carefully posed.
Photobook history is a relatively recent area of study, with one of the first “book-on-books” anthologies published in 1999 with the release of Fotografía Pública / Photography in Print 1919-1939, a catalogue associated with an exhibition of the same title at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Over the past two decades, a virtual cottage industry of books-on-photobooks has emerged, documenting photographically illustrated books based on geography or around a theme. Photobooks by women are in short supply in most of these anthologies, which is why 10×10 Photobooks launched the How We See: Photobooks by Women touring reading room and associated publication in 2018. Focusing on contemporary photobooks by women from 2000 to 2018, the project was the first step in 10×10 Photobooks’ ongoing interest in reassessing photobook history as it relates to women. Although only twenty-five years old, photobook history has been written primarily by men and has focused on publications authored by men. Very few books by women photographers appear in past photobook anthologies, and those included are already quite well known.
As a nonprofit organisation with a mission to share photobooks globally and encourage their appreciation and understanding, the 10×10 Photobooks team frequently discusses how photobook history was – and continues to be – written from a skewed perspective and that a “new” history needs to emerge. Early in our discussions, we recognised photobook history as needing to be “rewritten,” but this implied we accepted the partial history already in existence, which we did not. Instead, we concluded that photobook history needs to be “unwritten,” as the existing history is riddled with omissions. What is left out is not by mistake – it indicates bias and incomplete research by the current gatekeepers. To present a more inclusive and diverse vision, we must collectively address these omissions.
What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999, a touring reading room accompanied by a publication and series of public programs, is a means to ignite interest in some of the underexposed and undocumented photobooks by women made between 1843 and 1999 and to begin a process of filling in the gaps. We say “some photobooks” because we are keenly aware that much work is still required, and we have only opened the door a crack. In several cases, particularly for books done before 1900 in regions other than North America and Europe or by women of colour, we heard about an artist who may have produced a photographically illustrated book or album, but we were unable to find any further documentation other than a brief mention before the trail went cold. Other impediments emerged among the cohort of women who collaborated with their husbands. Many of their collaborative books are credited only with their husbands’ names, and their contributions, if mentioned at all, are included as footnotes. In some cases, women authors marked their works with a gender-neutral signature that used only their studio name or first initial and last name. In addition, our initial research was impeded by the standard definition of a photobook: a bound volume with photographic illustrations published by the author, an independent publisher, or a trade publisher.
We found that we had to widen the frame to include individual albums, slim exhibition pamphlets, scrapbooks, maquettes, zines, and artists’ books in order to be more inclusive. This wider frame necessitated redefining a photobook author to incorporate those who may not call themselves a photographer or artist but who nonetheless assembled a “book” composed of photographs taken by themselves or others. Funding was another limitation. Many women photographers who actively exhibited their work either lacked the personal resources to produce a book or could not find anyone willing to underwrite such a venture.
This iteration of the What They Saw reading room includes 60 books of the more than 250 volumes highlighted in the associated publication. Most of these publications are kept in the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre. They are presented chronologically and show examples of books from around the globe. We begin with Anna Atkins, a British botanist, who was the first person ever to print and distribute a photobook. Her simple desire to share images of her algae specimens ushered in a new art form that presents photography in the book format. In the following years, women such as Isabel Agnes Cowper, the Official Museum Photographer at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), used photography to document museum objects, subsequently reproduced in numerous books. Until recently, her name was forgotten, as none of the South Kensington Museum publications credit her as the photographer.
In the early twentieth-century, women authors of photobooks gained some visibility. Fine-art photographer Germaine Krull published numerous books that approached photography from a creative and inventive perspective. Margaret Bourke-White emerged as a well-regarded photojournalist who traveled worldwide photographing for Fortune and Life magazines and producing countless books. In the 1930s, in Russia, Varvara Stepanova collaborated with her husband, Aleksandr Rodchenko, to create books filled with experimental photomontages. As the century progressed, women in other parts of the world also found their voices in photobooks. African American anthropologist Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson traveled to Uganda and South Africa and published African Journey in 1945, one of the earliest books written on Africa by a female scholar of color. In Mexico in 1951, Lola Álvarez Bravo contributed photographs to Acapulco en el sueño, a bold publication created to attract tourism to Acapulco. A few years later, Fina Gómez Revenga, a Venezuelan photographer, worked in Paris with the famed French printing house Draeger Frères to illustrate the poems of Surrealist poet Lise Deharme.
With the arrival of the 1960s, women emerged from the sidelines and began to produce widely distributed, often socially focused, photobooks. A New York City street photographer, Helen Levitt, published A Way of Seeing in 1965, while Carla Cerati collaborated on Morire di classe in 1969, a visually compelling commentary on the appalling conditions in Italian psychiatric hospitals. With the women’s movement finding its full voice in the 1970s, women photographers took center stage in the last three decades of the twentieth-century, releasing a steady flow of photobooks. A year after her death in 1971, Aperture published Diane Arbus’s monograph, a photobook that continues to influence generations of photographers. Barbara Brändli, a Swiss immigrant to Venezuela, documents the energy and rapid transformations of Caracas, while activist-photographer JEB (Joan E. Biren) toured the United States, capturing lesbian pride events. In South Africa, Lesley Lawson, a member of the Afrapix photo agency, combined interviews and her photographs to reveal the working conditions of Black women in Johannesburg. Cameroonian Angèle Etoundi Essamba shares the beauty and spirit of Black women in Passion (1989), while American Donna Ferrato unflinchingly explores domestic violence in Living with the Enemy (1991), and Nan Goldin exposes violent love and loss in her personal narrative, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). In books centered on cultural explorations, Wang Hsin photographs the fading traditions of Lanyu (Orchid Island) off the coast of Taiwan, Cristina García Rodero records religious festivals and rituals in her native Spain, and Ketaki Sheth documents twins and triplets in the Indian Gujarati community.
In reaching out to the far corners of the world, we uncovered numerous forgotten books, but many remain undiscovered. For example, we learned about a nineteenth-century woman in Iran who kept her husband’s diary and most probably added her photographs to the volume, but no visual documentation of this diary could be found. We also discovered several books that featured the participation of women in collaboration with male photographers where the women’s contributions were ambiguous. There were several “leads” of this nature, and we decided that leaving them out would be a missed opportunity. Therefore, in the associated anthology, we have included a “timeline” that presents several historically significant publishing, magazine, small press, photography, and feminist events that may or may not have produced a photobook, but have undoubtedly influenced its history. To support further exploration of these unresolved “leads,” 10×10 Photobooks has launched a research grant program to encourage scholarship on underexplored topics in photobook history.
From its inception, What They Saw has sought to include a diverse group of photographically illustrated publications by women. For photobook history to become more inclusive, it requires everyone (men, women, nonbinary, white, Black, Asian, African, Latinx, Indigenous, Western, Eastern, etc.) to contribute. We see this reading room of women’s role in the production, dissemination, and authoring of photobooks as a necessary step in the unwriting of the current photobook history and a rewriting of a photobook history that is more equitable and inclusive. We invite future researchers to take the next steps to explore further women and other marginalised people’s historical impact in the realm of photobooks and to expand upon the books we present in this reading room and its associated anthology.
Text from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Installation views of the exhibition What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Sabatini Building
Santa Isabel, 52
Nouvel Building
Ronda de Atocha (with plaza del Emperador Carlos V)
28012 Madrid Phone: (34) 91 774 10 00
Curator: The exhibition is curated by Andrea Nelson, associate curator in the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Ilse Salberg (German, 1899-1947) Anton im Detail (Anton in Detail) 1938 Gelatin silver print Image: 29.6 x 39.8cm (11 5/8 x 15 11/16 in.) Frame (outer): 41.3 x 51.3 x 2.7cm (16 1/4 x 20 3/16 x 1 1/16 in.) Galerie Berinson, Berlin
Ilse Salberg (1899-1947) worked in the New Vision style in Paris and Sanary-sur-Mer. Driven from Cologne, Germany by persecutions, escaping the SS in Barjols, France, she died early of cancer in Switzerland. …
For a long time, Ilse Salberg’s photographs went unnoticed by the public. Most of her photographs from exile in France were lost while fleeing. Fortunately, in 1963 Anton Räderscheidt and his new wife Giséle found paintings and negatives by Ilse Salberg in a cellar in Barjols, which she had to leave behind when she fled to Switzerland.
The second of a humungous three-part posting on this archaeological exhibition.
Combined with the posting I did on this exhibition when it was on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, this three-part posting will include over 160 new images from the exhibition… meaning a combined total over the four postings of over 200 images with biographical information.
This has been a mammoth effort to construct these postings but so worthwhile!
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“[Lee] Miller was the quintessential New Woman, as were the photographers in The New Woman Behind the Camera in New York. Andrea Nelson, who organised the show at its next destination, the National Gallery in Washington, says these new women were independent, competent, and – especially in the 1920s – found themselves in a moment when they were fighting for, then winning the right to vote, “and had really started examining their lives, their marriages and children.” They were also exploring what it meant to be professional photographers. “It was a time when photography was replacing drawings in all the magazines,” says Nelson. And women could sell their advertising and fashion pictures readily.”
Helene Bertha Amalie “Leni” Riefenstahl (German, 22 August 1902 – 8 September 2003) was a German film director, photographer, and actress, known for her seminal role in producing Nazi propaganda.
The relentless pursuit of the truth about Riefenstahl. About time.
She knew what was going on and hitched her wagon to National Socialism, taking money to make her film Tiefland (Lowlands), bringing in extra from a concentration camp, keeping them in rags and starving them. After filming some were executed in the gas chambers. Her story is similar to that of Albert Speer (Hitler’s architect) who after being released from Spandau prison in 1966 rehabilitated himself by writing books and public speaking about his wartime experiences. Only recently has it come to light that Speer knew all along about the ruthlessness of the Nazi regime and – as Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production (until 2 September 1943 Reich Minister of Armaments and Munitions) – used conscripted labour and prisoners of war in appalling conditions to power the Nazi war effort. Many thousands died as a result of his zeal.
“Riefenstahl denied that she had visited the camp to handpick the extras, denied failing to pay them and denied having promised and subsequently failed to save them from Auschwitz. She claimed that, while making the film, she had not known of the existence of the gas chambers, nor of the fate of the Roma and Sinti.”
Vera Jackson (American, 1911-1999) Man at Printing Press 1940s Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 27.94 x 35.56cm (11 x 14 in.) Frame: 40.64 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.) Framed (outer): 43.18 x 53.34cm (17 x 21 in.) Collection of Friends, the Foundation of the California African American Museum. Gift of the artist Courtesy of the California African American Museum
Vera Jackson (July 21, 1911 – January 26, 1999) was a “pioneer woman photographer in the black press”. She photographed African-American social life and celebrity culture in 1930s and 1940s Los Angeles. Noted photographic subjects included major league baseball player Jackie Robinson, educator Mary McLeod Bethune, and actresses Dorothy Dandridge, Hattie McDaniel and Lena Horne.
Hildegard Rosenthal (Brazilian born Switzerland, 1913-1990) Ponto de encontro Ladeira Porto Geral, esquina da Rua 25 de Março, São Paulo (Meeting Place Ladeira Porto Geral, Corner of 25 de Março Street, São Paulo) c. 1940, printed later Gelatin silver print Image: 24 x 36cm (9 7/16 x 14 3/16 in.) Mount: 40 x 50cm (15 3/4 x 19 11/16 in.) Frame (outer): 42 x 52cm (16 9/16 x 20 1/2 in.) Instituto Moreira Salles Collection Hildegard Rosenthal / Acervo Instituto Moreira Salles
Hildegard Rosenthal (Brazilian born Switzerland, 1913-1990)
Hildegard Baum Rosenthal (March 25, 1913 – September 16, 1990) was a Swiss-born Brazilian photographer, the first woman photojournalist in Brazil. She was part of the generation of European photographers who emigrated during World War II and, acting in the local press, contributed to the photographic aesthetic renovation of Brazilian newspapers.
Life and career
Rosenthal was born in Zurich, Switzerland. Until her adolescence, she lived in Frankfurt (Germany), where she studied pedagogy from 1929 until 1933. She lived in Paris between 1934 and 1935. Upon her return to Frankfurt, she studied photography for about 18 months in a program led by Paul Wolff [de]. Wolff emphasised small, portable cameras that used 35 mm film. These were a recent innovation at the time, and could be used unobtrusively for street photography. She also studied photographic laboratory techniques at the Gaedel Institute.
In this same period, she had entered a relationship with Walter Rosenthal. Rosenthal was Jewish, and Jews were increasingly persecuted in Germany in the 1930s under the National Socialist (Nazi) regime that took power in 1933. Walter Rosenthal emigrated to Brazil in 1936. Hildegard joined him in São Paulo in 1937. That same year she began working as a laboratory supervisor at the Kosmos photographic materials and services company. A few months later, the agency Press Information hired her as a photojournalist and she did news reports for national and international newspapers. During this period, she took photographs of the city of São Paulo and the state countryside of Rio de Janeiro and other cities in southern Brazil, as well as portraying several personalities from the São Paulo cultural scene, such as the painter Lasar Segall, the writers Guilherme de Almeida and Jorge Amado, the humorist Aparicio Torelly (Barão de Itararé) and the cartoonist Belmonte. Her images sought to capture the artist at his moment of creation, in obvious connection with his spirit of reporter. She interrupted her professional activity in 1948, after the birth of her first daughter. And in 1959, after her husband died, she took over the management of her family’s company.
Artistic trajectory
Her photographs remained little known until 1974, when art historian Walter Zanini held a retrospective of her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo. The following year the Museum of Image and Sound of São Paulo (MIS) was opened with the exhibition Memória Paulistana, by Rosenthal. In 1996 the Instituto Moreira Salles acquired more than 3,000 of her negatives, in which urban scenes of São Paulo from the 1930s and 1940s stood out, during which time the city underwent a vertiginous growth, both material and cultural. Other negatives were donated by her during her life to the Lasar Segall Museum.
“Photography without people does not interest me,” she said at the Museum of Image and Sound of São Paulo in 1981.
Liselotte Grschebina (Israeli born Germany, 1908-1994)
Liselotte Grschebina (or Grjebina; 1908-1994) was an Israeli photographer. …
In January 1932 Grschebina opens Bilfoto, her own studio, announcing her specialisation in child photography, and takes on students. In 1933, following the Nazis come to power and the restrictions on professional freedom for Jews, Grschebina closed her studio. Before leaving Germany, she marries Dr. Jacob (Jasha) Grschebin. …
The Grschebin couple reaches Tel Aviv in March 1934. The same year, Grschebina opens the Ishon studio on Allenby Street with her friend Ellen Rosenberg (Auerbach), previously a partner in the Berlin photographic studio ringl + pit. In 1936 the Ishon studio is closed when Rosenberg leaves the country; Grschebina continues to work from her home.
Style
Grschebina arrived in Palestine in 1934, a trained professional profoundly influenced by the revolutionary movements of the Weimar Republic: New Objectivity in painting and New Vision in photography, as well as by a number of prominent professors, including Karl Hubbuch and Wilhelm Schnarrenberger. Unlike many of her colleagues in Palestine, who sought their identities in the collective Zionist endeavour by documenting and extolling it in their work, Grschebina did not use photography as a means of forming her identity. She came with a full-fledged style and remained committed to Weimar artistic ideals and principles in her new home, where she continued to apply and develop them. … Grschebina’s artistic roots clearly lay in New Vision, which defined photography as an artistic field in its own right and called on camera artists to portray subjects in a new, different way to convey their unique qualities and their essence. She did this through striking vantage points and strong diagonals, making masterful use of mirrors, reflections, and plays of light and shadow to create geometric shapes and to endow her photographs with atmosphere, appeal, and meaning.
In Germany, most of her photographs – usually advertising commissions – were taken in the studio. In the land of Israel, she also worked outdoors, observing those around her with a clear, impartial eye. She photographed people going about their daily routine, unaffected by the presence of the camera. The viewer of her pictures feels like an outsider looking in, gaining a new, objective perspective on the subject: the “objective portrait … not encumbered with subjective intention” wherein, according to New Vision photographer László Moholy-Nagy, lies the genius of photography.
Legacy
The photographs of Liselotte Grschebina, rediscovered casually, almost miraculously, in a cupboard in Tel Aviv, reveal a talent that might otherwise have remained forgotten.
The archive of Liselotte Grschebina’s photographs were given to the Israel Museum by her son, Beni Gjebin and his wife Rina, from Shoham, with the assistance of Rachel and Dov Gottesman, the museum president between 2001 and 2011.
Eiko Yamazawa (山沢 栄子, Yamazawa Eiko, February 19, 1899 – July 16, 1995) was a renowned Japanese photographer. She is considered one of Japan’s earliest women photographers and is among the few women photographers in Japan who were active both before and after World War II. First trained in Nihonga, she later studied photography in the U.S. under the mentorship of Consuelo Kanaga, and also exposed to the work of Kanaga’s contemporaries such as Paul Strand and Edward Weston.
After coming back to Japan in 1929, she established herself as a professional photographer. In 1931 she opened a portrait studio in Osaka, and in 1950 she established the Yamazawa Institute of Photography also in Osaka. In the early half of her career, Yamazawa was engaged in portraiture and commercial photography, having produced work for major Osaka department stores. In 1960 she shifted abstraction away from realism. Her work in this latter half of her career is characterised by her photographing art materials in distortion and reflection. Yamazawa’s photographs were unique at the time for their use of vibrant colour, which was in stark contrast to black and white photography championed by other Japanese photographers.
Yamamoto Yasue (Japanese 山 本 安 英, actually Yamamoto Chiyo (山 本 千代); born October 29, 1906 in Tōkyō ; died December 29, 1993 there) was a Japanese actress.
Yamamoto Yasue attended from 1921 the “School for modern theater training for women” (現代 劇 女優 養成 所, Gendaigeki joyū yōseijo), which was directed by Ichikawa Sadanji II (二世 市 川 左 団 次; 1880-1940). In 1924 she became a founding member of the “Small Theater Tsukiji” (築 地 小 劇 所) directed by Osanai Kaoru and played the leading role in 67 productions. After Osanai’s death in 1928, Yamamoto and Hijikata Yoshi (1998-1959) founded the “New Tsukiji Theater Company” (新 築 地 劇 団, Shin Tsukiji gekidan). Until the end of the Pacific War, she also took part in radio broadcasts.
In 1951 the Ministry of Culture honored Yamamoto for her role as Tsū in Kinoshita Junji’s internationally acclaimed play “Yūzuru” (夕 鶴), “Crane in the Twilight” [A1] , which had been performed since 1949. In 1966 she founded the “Yasue no kai” (安 英 の 会) to research recitation in contemporary pieces. Yamamoto had a unique presence on stage and a sophisticated way of speaking. In 1974 she was awarded the Asahi Prize and in 1984 the Mainichi Art Prize.
Eiko Yamazawa (Japanese, 1899-1995)
Yūzō Yamamoto (山本 有三, Yamamoto Yūzō, July 27, 1887 – January 11, 1974) was a Japanese novelist and playwright. His real name was written as “山本 勇造” but pronounced the same as his pen name. He was born to a family of kimono makers in Tochigi-city, Tochigi Prefecture.
He studied German literature at Tokyo Imperial University. After graduating, he gained popularity for his solidly crafted plays, some twenty in all, notably Professor Tsumura (Tsumura kyōju, 1919), The Crown of Life (生命の冠, Inochi no kanmuri, 1920), Infanticide (Eijigoroshi, 1920), and People Who Agree (同志の人々, Dōshi no hitobito, 1923). In 1926 he turned to novels, known for their clarity of expression and dramatic composition. Later, with the writers Kan Kikuchi and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, he helped to co-found the Japanese Writer’s Association and openly criticised Japan’s wartime military government for its censorship policies.
After World War II he joined the debate on Japanese language reform, and from 1947 to 1953 he served in the National Diet as a member of the House of Councillors. He is well known for his opposition to the use of enigmatic expressions in written Japanese and his advocacy for the limited use of furigana [a Japanese reading aid]. In 1965 he was awarded the prestigious Order of Culture. He died at his summer villa in Yugawara, Kanagawa in 1974.
Yamamoto’s large European-style house in Mitaka, Tokyo, was expropriated by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers by eminent domain during the occupation period from 1945 to 1953. The mansion was then used as an archive and research lab by non-profit organisations for years, until it was converted into the Mitaka City Yūzō Yamamoto Memorial Museum in 1996. There is also a museum dedicated to him in his hometown of Tochigi.
Valentina Kulagina (Russian, 1902-1987) A. Tarasov-Rodionov’s “October” 1930 Book cover maquette with collage of cut-and-pasted gelatin silver prints, gouache, and ink on paper Overall: 20.7 x 31.2cm (8 1/8 x 12 1/4 in.) Frame: 40.64 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.) Frame (outer): 43.18 x 53.34cm (17 x 21 in.) Collection Merrill C. Berman
Valentina Kulagina, full name Valentina Nikiforovna Kulagina-Klutsis (Russian: Валентина Никифоровна Кулагина-Клуцис, 1902-1987) was a Russian painter and book, poster, and exhibition designer. She was a central figure in Constructivist avant-garde in the early 20th century alongside El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko other and her husband Gustav Klutsis. She is known for the Soviet revolutionary and Stalinist propaganda she produced in collaboration with Klutsis.
Elizaveta Ignatovich (Russian, 1903-1983) The struggle for the polytechnical school is the struggle for the five-year plan, for the communist education about class consciousness 1931 Photolithograph Sheet: 51.4 x 72.1cm (20 1/4 x 28 3/8 in.) Frame: 66.04 x 86.36cm (26 x 34 in.) Collection Merrill C. Berman
Elizaveta Ignatovich (Russian, 1903-1983)
Elizaveta Ignatovich (1903-1983) was born in Moscow, and was a well-regarded photographer and photojournalist of the 1920s through 1940s. In 1929, Elizaveta joined the experimental October organisation with such artists as Alexander Rodchenko, Elizar Langman, Dmitry Debabov, and her husband Boris Ignatovich. After October disbanded, she joined the Ignatovich Brigade along with her husband; her sister-in-law, Olga; Elizar Langman; J. Brodsky and L. Bach.
Elizaveta participated in many photographic exhibitions in the 1930s both in the Soviet Union and abroad including the seminal 1937 exhibition, First all-Union Exhibition of Soviet Photographic Art. While a prolific photographer of her day, Elizaveta’s photographs are now distinguished for their rarity. Among her photographs are Family of Kolkhoz Farmer, Portrait of Pioneer Leader Galina Pogrebniak, The Worker Tatiana Surina, and At the Kokhoz’s 10 Year Anniversary. By 1940, having gained a reputation as a veteran of documentary art photography, Sovetskoe Foto (1940, no. 3, “Zhenshchiny-fotoreportery”) wrote on Elizaveta:
“She is captivated by the fast-paced developments and the colourfulness of our lives, and she knows how to present it in a new fashion with the eyes of an artist. Her work is opposed to posturing and artificiality; as well as to the flashiness in formalist scholasticism.
Overall, E. Ignatovich tends to analyse every component of the scene before taking the shot. For this reason, she is attracted to creating monumental work and to constructing the scene. And E. Ignatovich truly succeeds in creating these scenes. A rich characterisation of her subjects and an artistic integrity distinguish her work.”
The writer for Sovetskoe Foto underscores Ignatovich’s ability to breath life into her subjects by manifesting their histories and personalities on film. In Family of Kolzhoz Farmer, Ignatovich creates an elaborate scene framed compositionally by tasseled curtains. Occupied by their tasks, Ignatovich’s subjects reveal their dynamic as a tight-knit Soviet family, and suggest their own personalities and concerns.
Later in her career, Ignatovich worked creating commercial photographic albums and post cards for the art publishing house Izogiz and the art journal Iskusstvo. In 1956, she received a silver medal and diploma at the Fifth International Salon of Art Photography (see Power of Pictures, 2015, p. 223) in Paris.
In 2015, E. Ignatovich’s artwork was included in the acclaimed exhibition The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film at the Jewish Museum in New York.
Anonymous text. “Elizaveta Ignatovich,” on the Nailya Alexander Gallery website [Online] Cited 28/11/2021. No longer available online
During the 1920s, the iconic New Woman was splashed across the pages of magazines and projected on the silver screen. As a global phenomenon, she embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art. Featuring more than 120 photographers from over 20 countries, the groundbreaking exhibition, The New Woman Behind the Camera, explores the diverse “new” women who embraced photography as a mode of professional and personal expression from the 1920s to the 1950s. The first exhibition to take an international approach to the subject, it examines how women brought their own perspectives to artistic experimentation, studio portraiture, fashion and advertising work, scenes of urban life, ethnography, and photojournalism, profoundly shaping the medium during a time of tremendous social and political change. Accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, this landmark exhibition will be on view from October 31, 2021 through January 30, 2022, in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, Washington. It was previously on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from July 2 through October 3, 2021.
In an era when traditional definitions of womanhood were being questioned, women’s lives were a mix of emancipating and confining experiences that varied by country. Many women around the world found the camera to be a means of independence as they sought to redefine their positions in society and expand their rights. This exhibition presents a geographically, culturally, and artistically diverse range of practitioners to advance new conversations about the history of modern photography and the continual struggle of women to gain creative agency and self-representation.
“This innovative exhibition reevaluates the history of modern photography through the lens of the New Woman, a feminist ideal that emerged at the end of the 19th century and spread globally during the first half of the 20th century,” said Kaywin Feldman, director, National Gallery of Art. “The transnational realities of modernism visualised in photography by women such as Lola Álvarez Bravo, Berenice Abbott, Claude Cahun, Germaine Krull, Dorothea Lange, Niu Weiyu, Tsuneko Sasamoto, and Homai Vyarawalla offer us an opportunity to better understand the present by becoming more fully informed of the past.”
About the exhibition
This landmark exhibition critically examines the extraordinary impact women had on the practice of photography worldwide from the 1920s to the 1950s. It presents the work of over 120 international photographers who took part in a dramatic expansion of the medium propelled by artistic creativity, technological innovation, and the rise of the printed press. Photographers such as Berenice Abbott, Ilse Bing, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Madame d’Ora, Florence Henri, Elizaveta Ignatovich, Germaine Krull, Dorothea Lange, Dora Maar, Niu Weiyu, Eslanda Goode Robeson, Tsuneko Sasamoto, Gerda Taro, and Homai Vyarawalla, among many others, emerged at a tumultuous moment in history that was profoundly shaped by two world wars, a global economic depression, struggles for decolonisation, and the rise of fascism and communism. Against the odds, these women were at the forefront of experimentation with the camera and produced invaluable visual testimony that reflects both their personal experiences and the extraordinary social and political transformations of the era.
Organised thematically in eight galleries, The New Woman Behind the Camera illustrates women’s groundbreaking work in modern photography, exploring their innovations in the fields of social documentary, avant-garde experimentation, commercial studio practice, photojournalism, ethnography, and the recording of sports, dance, and fashion. By evoking the global phenomenon of the New Woman, the exhibition seeks to reevaluate the history of photography and advance new and more inclusive conversations on the contributions of female photographers.
Known by different names, from nouvelle femme and neue Frau to modan gāru and xin nüxing, the New Woman was easy to recognise but hard to define. Fashionably dressed with her hair bobbed, the self-assured cosmopolitan New Woman was arguably more than a marketable image. She was a contested symbol of liberation from traditional gender roles. Revealing how women photographers from around the world gave rise to and embodied the quintessential New Woman even as they critiqued the popular construction of the role, the exhibition opens with a group of compelling portraits and self-portraits. In these works, women defined their positions as professionals and artists during a time when they were seeking greater personal rights and freedoms.
For many women, the camera became an effective tool for self-determination as well as a source of income. With better access to education and a newfound independence, female photographers emerged as a major force in studio photography. From running successful businesses in Berlin, Buenos Aires, London, and Vienna, to earning recognition as one of the first professional female photographers in their home country, women around the world, including Karimeh Abbud, Steffi Brandl, Trude Fleischmann, Annemarie Heinrich, Eiko Yamazawa, and Madame Yevonde, reinvigorated studio practice. A collaborative space where both sitters and photographers negotiated gender, race, and cultural difference, the portrait studio was also vitally important to African American communities which sought to represent and define themselves within a society that continued to be plagued by racism. Photography studios run by Black women, such as Florestine Perrault Collins and Winifred Hall Allen, thrived throughout the United States, and not only preserved likenesses and memories, but also constructed a counter narrative to the stereotyping images that circulated in the mass media.
With the invention of smaller lightweight cameras, a growing number of women photographers found that the camera’s portability created new avenues of discovery outside the studio. In stunning photographs of the city, photographers such as Alice Brill, Rebecca Lepkoff, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, Genevieve Naylor, and Tazue Satō Matsunaga used their artistic vision to capture the exhilarating modern world around them. They depicted everyday life, spontaneous encounters on the street, and soaring architectural views in places like Bombay (now Mumbai), New York, Paris, São Paulo, and Tokyo, revealing the multiplicity of urban experience. Many incorporated the newest photographic techniques to convey the energy of the city, and the exhibition continues with a gallery focused on those radical formal approaches that came to define modern photography. Through techniques like photomontage, photograms, sharp contrasts of light and shadow, extreme cropping, and dizzying camera angles, women including Aenne Biermann, Imogen Cunningham, Dora Maar, Tina Modotti, Lucia Moholy, and Cami Stone pushed the boundaries of the medium.
Women also produced dynamic pictures of the modern body, including innovative nude studies as well as sport and dance photography. Around the world, participation in spectator and team sports increased along with membership in fitness and hygiene reform movements. New concepts concerning health and sexuality along with new attitudes in movement and dress emphasised the body as a central site of experiencing modernity. On view are luminous works by photographers Laure Albin Guillot, Yvonne Chevalier, Florence Henri, and Jeanne Mandello who reimagined the traditional genre of the nude. Photographs by Irene Bayer-Hecht and Liselotte Grschebina highlight joyous play and gymnastic exercise, while Charlotte Rudolph, Ilse Bing, Trude Fleischmann, and Lotte Jacobi made breathtaking images of dancers in motion, revealing the body as artistic medium.
During the modern period, a growing number of women pursued professional photographic careers and traveled widely for the first time. Many took photographs that documented their experiences abroad and interactions with other cultures as they engaged in formal and informal ethnographic projects. The exhibition continues with a selection of photographs and photobooks by women, mainly from Europe and the United States, that reveal a diversity of perspectives and approaches. Gender provided some of these photographers with unusual access and the drive to challenge discriminatory practices, while others were not exempt from portraying stereotypical views. Publications by Jette Bang, Hélène Hoppenot, Ella Maillart, Anna Riwkin, Eslanda Goode Robeson, and Ellen Thorbecke exemplify how photographically illustrated books and magazines were an influential form of communication about travel and ethnography during the modern period. Other works on display include those by Denise Bellon and Ré Soupault, who traveled to foreign countries on assignment for magazines and photo agencies seeking ethnographic and newsworthy photographs, and those by Marjorie Content and Laura Gilpin, who worked on their own in the southwestern United States.
The New Woman – both as a mass-circulating image and as a social phenomenon – was confirmed by the explosion of photographs found in popular fashion and lifestyle magazines. Fashion and advertising photography allowed many women to gain unprecedented access to the public sphere, establish relative economic independence, and attain autonomous professional success. Producing a rich visual language where events and ideas were expressed directly in pictures, illustrated fashion magazines such as Die Dame, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue became an important venue for photographic experimentation by women for a female readership. Photographers producing original views of women’s modernity include Lillian Bassman, Ilse Bing, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Toni Frissell, Toni von Horn, Frances McLaughlin-Gill, ringl + pit, Margaret Watkins, Caroline Whiting Fellows, and Yva.
The rise of the picture press also established photojournalism and social documentary as dominant forms of visual expression during the modern period. Ignited by the effects of a global economic crisis and growing political and social unrest, numerous women photographers including Lucy Ashjian, Margaret Bourke-White, Kati Horna, Elizaveta Ignatovich, Kata Kálmán, Dorothea Lange, and Hansel Mieth engaged a wide public with gripping images. So-called soft topics such as “women and children,” “the family,” and “the home front” were more often assigned to female photojournalists than to their male counterparts. The exhibition asks viewers to question the effect of having women behind the camera in these settings. Pictures produced during the war, from combat photography by Galina Sanko and Gerda Taro to images of the Blitz in London by Thérèse Bonney and the Tuskegee airmen by Toni Frissell, are also featured. At the war’s end, haunting images by Lee Miller of the opening of Nazi concentration camps and celebratory images of the victory parade of Allied Forces in New Delhi by Homai Vyarawalla made way for the transition to the complexities of the postwar era, including images of daily life in US-occupied Japan by Tsuneko Sasamoto and the newly formed People’s Republic of China by Hou Bo and Niu Weiyu.
The New Woman Behind the Camera acknowledges that women are a diverse group whose identities are defined not exclusively by gender but rather by a host of variable factors. It contends that gender is an important aspect in understanding their lives and work and provides a useful framework for analysis to reveal how photography by women has powerfully shaped our understanding of modern life.
Exhibition catalog
Published by the National Gallery of Art, Washington and distributed by DelMonico Books | D.A.P., this groundbreaking, richly illustrated 288-page catalog examines the diverse women whose work profoundly marked the medium of photography from the 1920s to the 1950s. The book – featuring over 120 international photographers, including Lola Álvarez Bravo, Elizaveta Ignatovich, Germaine Krull, Dorothea Lange, Tsuneko Sasamoto, and Homai Vyarawalla – reevaluates the history of modern photography through the lens of the iconic New Woman. Inclusive scholarly essays introduce readers to these important photographers and question the past assumptions about gender in the history of photography. Contributors include Andrea Nelson, associate curator in the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art; Elizabeth Cronin, assistant curator of photography in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, New York Public Library; Mia Fineman, curator in the department of photographs, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Mila Ganeva, professor of German in the department of German, Russian, Asian, and Middle Eastern languages and cultures, Miami University, Ohio; Kristen Gresh, Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Elizabeth Otto, professor of modern and contemporary art history, University at Buffalo (The State University of New York); and Kim Sichel, associate professor in the department of the history of art and architecture at Boston University; biographies of the photographers by Kara Felt, Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art.
Press release from the National Gallery of Art
Ella Maillart (Swiss, 1903-1997) Turkistan Solo 1935 Bound volume Open: 21.59 x 22.86cm (8 1/2 x 9 in.) Cradle: 12.07 x 27.31 x 22.54cm (4 3/4 x 10 3/4 x 8 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Library, Gift of the Department of Photographs
Ella Maillart (Swiss, 1903-1997)
Ella Maillart (or Ella K. Maillart; 20 February 1903, Geneva – 27 March 1997, Chandolin) was a Swiss adventurer, travel writer and photographer, as well as a sportswoman.
Career
From the 1930s onwards she spent years exploring Muslim republics of the USSR, as well as other parts of Asia, and published a rich series of books which, just as her photographs, are today considered valuable historical testimonies. Her early books were written in French but later she began to write in English. Turkestan Solo describes a journey in 1932 in Soviet Turkestan. Photos from this journey are now displayed in the Ella Maillart wing of the Karakol Historical Museum. In 1934, the French daily Le Petit Parisien sent her to Manchuria to report on the situation under the Japanese occupation. It was there that she met Peter Fleming, a well-known writer and correspondent of The Times, with whom she would team up to cross China from Peking to Srinagar (3,500 miles), much of the route being through hostile desert regions and steep Himalayan passes. The journey started in February 1935 and took seven months to complete, involving travel by train, on lorries, on foot, horse and camelback. Their objective was to ascertain what was happening in Xinjiang (then also known as Sinkiang or Chinese Turkestan) where the Kumul Rebellion had just ended. Maillart and Fleming met the Hui Muslim forces of General Ma Hushan. Ella Maillart later recorded this trek in her book Forbidden Journey, while Peter Fleming’s parallel account is found in his News from Tartary. In 1937 Maillart returned to Asia for Le Petit Parisien to report on Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, while in 1939 she undertook a trip from Geneva to Kabul by car, in the company of the Swiss writer, Annemarie Schwarzenbach. The Cruel Way is the title of Maillart’s book about this experience, cut short by the outbreak of the second World War.
She spent the war years at Tiruvannamalai in the South of India, learning from different teachers about Advaita Vedanta, one of the schools of Hindu philosophy. On her return to Switzerland in 1945, she lived in Geneva and at Chandolin, a mountain village in the Swiss Alps. She continued to ski until late in life and last returned to Tibet in 1986.
Ellen Thorbecke (Dutch, 1902-1973) People in China: Thirty-Two Photographic Studies from Life 1935 Bound volume Closed: 30.48 x 22.86cm (12 x 9 in.) Open: 29.85 x 43.18cm (11 3/4 x 17 in.) Cradle: 13.97 x 40.64 x 30.48cm (5 1/2 x 16 x 12 in.) National Gallery of Art Library, David K.E. Bruce Fund
Ellen Thorbecke (Dutch, 1902-1973)
(Ellen Thorbecke, born Ellen Kolban, 1902-1973) is a woman who holds a unique position in Dutch photography. Her small yet extraordinary photo archive, one of the Nederlands Fotomuseum Collection’s true gems, shows rare images of everyday life in China during that era. She photographed with an open mind and as a result Ellen Thorbecke’s images are still relevant and immensely popular in China today.
Compelling photographer
In 1931, Ellen Thorbecke left Berlin for China to be reunited with her beloved husband Willem Thorbecke, who had been appointed as an envoy in China on behalf of the Netherlands. Before she left for China, she bought her first camera, as she was planning to work in China as a correspondent for the Berlin newspapers. To illustrate her articles, she captured a series of portraits and street scenes in the Chinese countryside and in the cities of Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. This was during the era when the idea of ‘East Meets West’ was gaining ground and a number of Western writers, filmmakers and artists were shining the spotlight on China.
Being a journalist from origin, Thorbecke gradually developed into a compelling photographer who infused her photographs with fully-engaged observation of the people and places she visited. The exhibition Ellen Thorbecke’s China presents photographs that capture the changing identity of the young Chinese Republic between centuries-old traditions and Western modernisation. Her images range from those that refer to traditional Chinese role patterns – such as arranged marriages at a young age – to modern portraits showing the desire for freedom and independence.
Anonymous text. “Ellen Thorbecke’s China,” on the Nederlands Fotomuseum website [Online] Cited 29/11/2021. No longer available online
Photographer and journalist Ellen Thorbecke (born Ellen Kolban, 1902-1973) occupies a unique and forgotten position in the photography world. In 1931 she left Berlin for Beijing. For this trip she bought her first camera. Thorbecke developed into a compelling photographer who provided her photos with engaged observations about the people and places she visited. She made reports in a lively candid style with an eye for the vitality of street life and has produced several photo books including Peking Studies (1934) and People in China (1935).
Her visual stories and travel guides make her oeuvre a unique time document. Her compact but special photo archive is held at the Dutch Fotomuseum in Rotterdam and consists of 638 black and white negatives, 166 of which were made in China. The photographs Thorbecke made are still relevant today because of her human, direct and unbiased way of looking.
Anonymous text. “Ellen Thorbecke,” on the Photography of China website [Online] Cited 29/11/2021
Eslanda Goode Robeson (American, 1896-1965) African Journey 1945 Bound volume Open: 21.59 x 31.75cm (8 1/2 x 12 1/2 in.) Mount: 3.49 x 31.27 x 21.75cm (1 3/8 x 12 5/16 x 8 9/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Library, Gift of the Department of Photographs
Eslanda Goode Robeson (American, 1896-1965)
Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson (American, 1896-1965), “Essie,” as she was called, was a photographer, actress, world traveler, author and activist
Born Eslanda Cardoza Goode in Washington, D.C., in 1896, “Essie,” as she was known by her intimates, was the wife of the dynamic performer and activist Paul Robeson. Although not as well known as her famous husband, Eslanda Robeson by no means hid in his shadow. Through her writings and actions, she advocated racial equality and withstood considerable political and social pressure in the course of her long activist career. …
The mid-1940s brought significant accolades to the Robesons as Eslanda’s book African Journey appeared in 1945 and Paul received the Spingarn Medal that same year. While a scholarly work, African Journey was not so much analytical as it was descriptive of the living habits and cultural customs of different tribes, complete with photographs taken by Eslanda. Both provocative and enlightening, it was a landmark work in the sense that it was the first by an American to show the need for reform among the colonial powers. This theme of colonialism became a focal point of Eslanda’s later writings; she strongly believed that the end of World War II hearkened a new era of freedom from European colonisers for emerging nations in Asia and Africa.
Esther Bubley (American, 1921-1998) Young woman in the doorway of her room at a boardinghouse, Washington, DC 1943 Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 26.42 x 25.4cm (10 3/8 x 10 in.) Frame: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.) Frame (outer): 53.34 x 43.18cm (21 x 17 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Kent and Marcia Minichiello
Esther Bubley (American, 1921-1998)
Esther Bubley (February 16, 1921 – March 16, 1998) was an American photographer who specialised in expressive photos of ordinary people in everyday lives. She worked for several agencies of the American government and her work also featured in several news and photographic magazines.
A protégée of Roy Stryker at the U.S. Office of War Information and subsequently at Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), Esther Bubley (1921-1998) was a preeminent freelance photographer during the “golden age” of American photojournalism, from 1945 to 1965. At a time when most post-war American women were anchored by home and family, Bubley was a thriving professional, traveling throughout the world, photographing stories for magazines such as LIFE and the Ladies’ Home Journal and for prestigious corporate clients that included Pepsi-Cola and Pan American World Airways.
“Put me down with people, and it’s just overwhelming,” Bubley exclaimed in an interview. Like most great photojournalists, she found her art in everyday life, and she successfully balanced her artistic ambitions with the demands of commercial publishing. Edward Steichen, curator of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art and the era’s arbiter of taste, was a great supporter of Bubley, whose work embodied his aesthetic ideal that photography “explain man to man and each to himself.” …
Bubley’s photographs are of cultural as well as artistic interest. Her photo-essays explore the era’s American stereotypes – the troubled child, the high school drop-out, the harried housewife, the enterprising farm family – that were elaborated in the pages of the magazines for which she worked. Her corporate assignments document the introduction of American companies into traditional cultures abroad. Bubley developed a specialty in stories about health care and mental health, documenting the era’s faith in new technologies and the growing prestige of psychology and psychiatry. She also covered her share of celebrities and popular culture topics, including children’s television and beauty contests. A cross-section of Bubley’s work provides a revealing glimpse into the post-war decades, seen not only through Bubley’s lens but through the pages of the illustrated magazines that dominated the mass media of the time.
Florence Henri (28 June 1893 – 24 July 1982) was a surrealist artist; primarily focusing her practice on photography and painting, in addition to pianist composition. In her childhood, she traveled throughout Europe, spending portions of her youth in Paris, Vienna, and the Isle of Wight. She studied in Rome, where she would encounter the Futurists, finding inspiration in their movement. From 1910 to 1922, she studied piano in Berlin, under the instruction of Egon Petri and Ferrucio Busoni. She would find herself landlocked to Berlin during the first World War, supporting herself by composing piano tracks for silent films. She returned to Paris in 1922, to attend the Académie André Lhote, and would attend until the end of 1923. From 1924 to 1925, she would study under painters Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant at the Académie Moderne. Henri’s most important artistic training would come from the Bauhaus in Dessau, in 1927, where she studied with masters Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy, who would introduce her to the medium of photography. She returned to Paris in 1929 where she started seriously experimenting and working with photography up until 1963. Finally, she would move to Compiègne, where she concentrated her energies on painting until the end of her life in 1982. Her work includes experimental photography, advertising, and portraits, many of which featured other artists of the time.
Florestine Perrault Collins (American, 1895-1988) Mae Fuller Keller Early 1920s Gelatin silver print Overall: 35.56 x 27.94cm (14 x 11 in.) Frame: 35.56 x 27.94cm (14 x 11 in.) Frame (outer): 39.37 x 31.75cm (15 1/2 x 12 1/2 in.) Dr Arthé A. Anthony
Florestine Perrault Collins (American, 1895-1988)
Florestine Perrault Collins (1895-1988) was an American professional photographer from New Orleans. Collins is noted for having created photographs of African-American clients that “reflected pride, sophistication, and dignity,” instead of racial stereotypes.
In 1909, Collins began practicing photography at age 14. Her subjects ranged from weddings, First Communions, and graduations to personal photographs of soldiers who had returned home. At the beginning of her career, Collins had to pass as a white woman to be able to assist photographers.
Collins eventually opened her own studio, catering to African-American families. She gained a loyal following and had success, due to both her photography and marketing skills. Out of 101 African-American women who identified themselves as photographers in the 1920 U.S. Census, Collins was the only one listed in New Orleans.
She advertised in newspapers, playing up the sentimentality of a well-done photograph. Collins also included her photograph in the ads to appeal to customers who thought a female photographer might take better pictures of babies and children.
According to the Encyclopedia of Louisiana, Collins’ career “mirrored a complicated interplay of gender, racial and class expectations”.
“The history of black liberation in the United States could be characterised as a struggle over images as much as it has also been a struggle over rights,” according to Bell Hooks. Collins’ photographs are representative of that. By taking pictures of black women and children in domestic settings, she challenged the pervasive stereotypes of the time about black women.
Photographer unknown Florestine Perrault Collins 1920s Gelatin silver print Overall: 35.56 x 27.94cm (14 x 11 in.) Frame: 35.56 x 27.94cm (14 x 11 in.) Frame (outer): 39.37 x 31.75cm (15 1/2 x 12 1/2 in.) Dr Arthé A. Anthony
Gertrude Fehr (German, 1895-1996) Odile 1936 Gelatin silver print Image: 32.39 x 29.21cm (12 3/4 x 11 1/2 in.) Frame: 60.96 x 50.8cm (24 x 20 in.) Frame (outer): 25.75 x 21.75cm (10 1/8 x 8 9/16 in.) Trish and Jan de Bont
Gertrude Fehr (German, 1895-1996)
Gertrude Fehr was a German photographer. She was born in Mainz on Tuesday 5 March 1895 and died in 1996 at the age of 101. She was one of the earliest professional female photographers.
Fehr studied photography at the Bavarian School of photography in Munich and undertook an apprenticeship in the Munich studio of Eduard Wasow. Shortly after finishing the apprenticeship, she set up a photographic studio dedicated fundamentally to the theatre and to the portrait technique which employed six people. In 1933, the rise of Hitler and the establishment of the Third Reich forced Fehr to close the studio and to emigrate to Paris with her future Swiss husband, the painter Jules Fehr. Installed in the French capital there she opened her own school of photography: PUBLI-phot.
In Paris she found the artistic atmosphere of the avant-garde of the time and, influenced by the movements modernism, began photographic experiments. Patent in those moments was the tremendous influence of the most transgressive photographer-painter of the moment, Man Ray, which she considered “fascinating”. Like him, she started experimenting with the solarisation process. The solarisation of Fehr (unlike Man Ray) are works that have a aesthetic which resembles an academic charcoal drawing. If it were not for the difference in procedures, Fehr’s “Odile” (1940) seems rather an image enhanced by traditional procedures rather than by the photographic avant-garde.
At the end of the 1930s she and her husband moved to Switzerland, where they opened a photography school in Lausanne.
Adele Gloria (Italian, 1910-1984) Senza titolo (Untitled) c. 1933 Collage with gelatin silver prints Overall: 18.2 x 21.27cm (7 3/16 x 8 3/8 in.) Mat: 39.37 x 49.85cm (15 1/2 x 19 5/8 in.) Frame: 40.64 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.) Frame (outer): 43.18 x 53.34cm (17 x 21 in.) Collection Merrill C. Berman
Adele Gloria was the only futurist woman in Sicily, she distinguished herself in the field of aeropainting and avant-garde, in the early 30s in Catania. She was a poet, photographer, painter, sculptor and journalist, a “total” artist according to the canons of the Futurist movement.
Adele Gloria (Italian, 1910-1984) Senza titolo (Untitled) (detail) c. 1933 Collage with gelatin silver prints Overall: 18.2 x 21.27cm (7 3/16 x 8 3/8 in.) Mat: 39.37 x 49.85cm (15 1/2 x 19 5/8 in.) Frame: 40.64 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.) Frame (outer): 43.18 x 53.34cm (17 x 21 in.) Collection Merrill C. Berman
Adele Gloria (Italian, 1910-1984) Senza titolo (Untitled) (detail) c. 1933 Collage with gelatin silver prints Overall: 18.2 x 21.27cm (7 3/16 x 8 3/8 in.) Mat: 39.37 x 49.85cm (15 1/2 x 19 5/8 in.) Frame: 40.64 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.) Frame (outer): 43.18 x 53.34cm (17 x 21 in.) Collection Merrill C. Berman
Hélène Hoppenot (French, 1894-1990) Chine 1946 Bound volume Open: 35.56 x 33.02cm (14 x 13 in.) Cradle:11.43 x 49.85 x 36.2cm (4 1/2 x 19 5/8 x 14 1/4 in.) National Gallery of Art Library, Gift of the Department of Photographs
Hélène Hoppenot (1894-1990) was a French amateur photographer who made thousands of snapshots using the Rolleiflex from 1933 to the 1970s.
Hoppenot made a trip to China where she photographed the everyday life and habits of Chinese people in the country and in the city. This book is her testimony of this travel. It is accompanied with a text from writer Paul Claudel who was deeply interested in Chinese culture and traveled to China as well.
Homai Vyarawalla (Indian, 1913-2012) The Ashes of Mahatma Gandhi Being Carried in a Procession, Allahabad February 1948 Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 38.1 x 38.1cm (15 x 15 in.) Frame: 53.34 x 53.34cm (21 x 21 in.) Frame (outer): 55.88 x 55.88cm (22 x 22 in.) Homai Vyarawalla Archive / The Alkazi Collection of Photography
Homai Vyarawalla (Indian, 1913-2012)
Homai Vyarawalla (9 December 1913 – 15 January 2012), commonly known by her pseudonym Dalda 13, was India’s first woman photojournalist. She began work in the late 1930s and retired in the early 1970s. In 2011, she was awarded Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian award of the Republic of India. She was amongst the first women in India to join a mainstream publication when she joined The Illustrated Weekly of India.
Career
Vyarawalla started her career in the 1930s. At the onset of World War II, she started working on assignments for Mumbai-based The Illustrated Weekly of India magazine which published many of her most admired black-and-white images. In the early years of her career, since Vyarawalla was unknown and a woman, her photographs were published under her husband’s name. Vyarawalla stated that because women were not taken seriously as journalists she was able to take high-quality, revealing photographs of her subjects without interference:
People were rather orthodox. They didn’t want the women folk to be moving around all over the place and when they saw me in a sari with the camera, hanging around, they thought it was a very strange sight. And in the beginning they thought I was just fooling around with the camera, just showing off or something and they didn’t take me seriously. But that was to my advantage because I could go to the sensitive areas also to take pictures and nobody will stop me. So I was able to take the best of pictures and get them published. It was only when the pictures got published that people realized how seriously I was working for the place.
~ Homai Vyarawalla in Dalda 13: A Portrait of Homai Vyarawalla (1995)
Eventually her photography received notice at the national level, particularly after moving to Delhi in 1942 to join the British Information Services. As a press photographer, she recorded many political and national leaders in the period leading up to independence, including Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Indira Gandhi and the Nehru-Gandhi family.
The Dalai Lama in ceremonial dress enters India through Nathu La in Sikkim on 24 November 1956, photographed by Homai Vyarawalla. In 1956, she photographed for Life Magazine the 14th Dalai Lama when he entered Sikkim in India for the first time via the Nathu La. Most of her photographs were published under the pseudonym “Dalda 13”. The reasons behind her choice of this name were that her birth year was 1913, she met her husband at the age of 13 and her first car’s number plate read “DLD 13”.
Photographer unknown Homai Vyarawalla photographing Ganesh Chaturthi at Chowpatty Beach, Bombay Late 1930s, printed later Inkjet print Image: 30.48 x 20.8cm (12 x 8 3/16 in.) Frame: 45.72 x 35.56cm (18 x 14 in.) Frame (outer): 48.26 x 38.1cm (19 x 15 in.) Homai Vyarawalla Archive / The Alkazi Collection of Photography
Homai Vyarawalla (Indian, 1913-2012) The Victory Parade by the Allied Forces in India Marking the End of the Second World War, Connaught Place, New Delhi 1945 Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 31 x 30.8cm (12 3/16 x 12 1/8 in.) Frame: 45.72 x 45.72cm (18 x 18 in.) Frame (outer): 48.26 x 48.26cm (19 x 19 in.) Homai Vyarawalla Archive / The Alkazi Collection of Photography
Homai Vyarawalla (Indian, 1913-2012) Students at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art, Bombay Late 1930s, printed later Inkjet print Image/sheet: 40.7 x 40.7cm (16 x 16 in.) Frame: 55.88 x 55.88cm (22 x 22 in.) Frame (outer): 58.42 x 58.42cm (23 x 23 in.) Homai Vyarawalla Archive / The Alkazi Collection of Photography
Judit Kárász (21 May 1912 – 30 May 1977) was a Hungarian photographer interested in the medium’s ability to reveal the hidden structures of everyday subject matter. Her photography brought together social documentary and modernist ideas such as Gestalt theory.
Bauhaus
On 21 June 1932 Kárász received her Bauhaus diploma, where she majored in photography. She was taught by Walter Peterhans, who founded the school’s photography department in 1929. Influenced by the work of artists such as fellow Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy who had previously taught at the school, Kárász began to experiment with compositional devices, such as bird’s-eye perspective, and explored modernist themes and subject matters including industrial landscapes.
Career
In 1931 Kárász became a member of Kostufa (Kommunistische Studenten Fraktion) a communist student group, and following her active role in election campaigns she was expelled from the Sachsen-Anhalt area of Germany. Between 1932-1935 Karasz worked as a laboratory technician at the Dephot in Berlin, a photographic agency that represented photojournalists, such as Robert Capa.
Karasz was involved with the Workers-Photography movement, a collective associated with communism dedicated to activating photography for social ends.
Vera Gabrielová (Czech, 1919-2002) Bez názvu (lžíce) (Untitled (Spoons)) 1935-1936 Gelatin silver print Image: 23.8 x 17.5cm (9 3/8 x 6 7/8 in.) Frame: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.) Frame (outer): 53.34 x 43.18cm (21 x 17 in.) Ellen and Robert Grimes
Jaroslava Hatláková (Czech, 1904-1989) Bez názvu (Untitled) c. 1936 Gelatin silver print 10.8 x 8.26cm (4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in.) Trish and Jan de Bont
Jeanne Mandello (née Johanna Mandello; October 18, 1907, Frankfurt – December 17, 2001, Barcelona) was a German modern artist and experimental photographer. …
In 1926 she began studying photography at Lette-Verein. In a time when it was difficult for a woman to get attention as an artist, photography opened a way into the art world. Inspired by the spirit of freedom in Berlin in the 1920s, the women’s movement offered an opportunity to go out, attended theater performances, concerts, exhibitions and decide on the model of the “new woman”, imitating Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach who wore pants and short hair. In 1927, she studied at the studio of Paul Wolff and Alfred Tritschler. Through Wolff, she became familiar with Leica Camera photography. Back in Berlin, she returned to Lette and finished her studies. Using a Leica film camera, she photographed portraits, landscapes and scenes of everyday life. In 1929, she taught in Frankfurt, creating a studio at her parents’ house. Here, she collaborated with the photographer Nathalie Reuter (1911-1990), a former classmate and friend. In 1932, she met Arno Grünebaum. Under Mandello’s guidance, he learned photography. In 1933, they married. Being Jewish and being aware of the coming danger, they left Germany in 1934 and began in Paris a new life.
Career
In Paris, she changed her first name Johanna into the French form, Jeanne. Like other modern photographers of the Weimar Republic, Mandello found inspiration during her exile in Paris. She was influenced by the Nouvelle Vision; by Man Ray, Brassaï and Doisneau, in redefined photography. They experimented with new techniques, unusual camera angles, picture cutouts, exposures and photomontages. Mandello and Grunbaum specialised in commercial and portrait photography and established themselves as fashion photographers. In 1937, they opened a studio in 17th Arrondissement under the name “Mandello”. “Mandello” did work for Fémina, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, as well as the fashion houses of Balenciaga, Guerlain, Maggy Rouff, and Creed. Occasionally, they worked with the photographer Hermann Landshoff, who had also fled Nazi Germany. After the outbreak of World War II, Mandello and her husband were considered Alien Enemies within the French Republic and were forced to leave Paris in early 1940. They had to leave everything behind: the photo studio, camera equipment, archived works and negatives. They were allowed to take only 14 kilos of luggage. They came to the village of Dognen where she helped out in the infirmary. Her German citizenship was withdrawn on 28 October 1940. With visas to Uruguay, Mandello and Grunebaum left France and started a new life in South America where she exhibited beginning in 1943. Her new work included architecture, landscapes, photograms, portraits, and solarisations. In 1952, she exhibited at Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, and two years later, she separated from her husband, and moved to Brazil to be with the journalist, Lothar Bauer. With Bauer, she moved to Barcelona at the end of the decade where she worked the rest of her life. She married Bauer, and they adopted a daughter, Isabel, in 1970. Mandello died in Barcelona in 2001.
Jeanne Mandello was a pioneer of modern photography and a Jewish avant-garde woman artist working in Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro and Barcelona.
She belongs to the same school of modern female photographers of the early 20th century as her contemporaries Grete Stern, Ellen Auerbach, Ilse Bing, Marianne Breslauer, Gisèle Freund, or, even though some years older, Germaine Krull. …
Jeanne Mandello became a cosmopolitan artist by the force of circumstances and brought the geometry of the Bauhaus and the surrealist fantasy of pre-war Paris to her later countries of residence, Uruguay, Brazil and Spain. Her eye remained European and wherever she lived her photographs rendered homage to her new countries. No country can claim her for itself but her work is another example of the universality of art, which transcends all physical frontiers.
Forgotten for nearly 50 years because of the historical circumstances surrounding her life, she is today rediscovered and seen as she should have been: an avant-garde Jewish-German woman artist and a pioneer in the field of modern photography.
Laura Gilpin (April 22, 1891 – November 30, 1979) was an American photographer. Gilpin is known for her photographs of Native Americans, particularly the Navajo and Pueblo, and Southwestern landscapes. Gilpin began taking photographs as a child in Colorado and formally studied photography in New York from 1916 to 1917 before returning to her home in Colorado to begin her career as a professional photographer.
Lucy Ashjian (1907-1993) is an American photographer best known as a member of the New York Photo League. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona and the Museum of the City of New York.
Margaret Michaelis (Austrian-Australian, 1902-1985) “Residencia de J. M. a Barcelona,” in D’Ací i d’Allà Spring 1936 Bound volume Open: 32.39 x 52.07cm (12 3/4 x 20 1/2 in.) Closed: 32.39 x 29.21cm (12 3/4 x 11 1/2 in.) Cradle: 15.88 x 57.15 x 33.02cm (6 1/4 x 22 1/2 x 13 in.) National Gallery of Art Library, David K.E. Bruce Fund
Margaret Michaelis (Austrian-Australian, 1902-1985) “Residencia de J. M. a Barcelona,” in D’Ací i d’Allà (detail) Spring 1936 Bound volume Open: 32.39 x 52.07cm (12 3/4 x 20 1/2 in.) Closed: 32.39 x 29.21cm (12 3/4 x 11 1/2 in.) Cradle: 15.88 x 57.15 x 33.02cm (6 1/4 x 22 1/2 x 13 in.) National Gallery of Art Library, David K.E. Bruce Fund
Margaret Michaelis (Austrian-Australian, 1902-1985)
Margaret (Margarethe) Michaelis-Sachs (née Gross, 1902-1985) was an Austrian-Australian photographer of Polish-Jewish origin. In addition to her many portraits, her architectural scenes of Barcelona and her images of the Jewish quarter in Kraków in the 1930s are of lasting historical interest.
Michaelis studied photography at Vienna’s Graphische Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt from 1918 to 1921.
Career
In 1922, still in Vienna, she first worked for a period at the Studio d’Ora before spending a number of years at the Atelier für Porträt Photographie. She went on to work for Binder Photographie in Berlin and Fotostyle in Prague, and finally returned to Berlin in 1929 to work intermittently for a variety of studios during the hard times of the Depression.
In October 1933, she married Rudolf Michaelis who, as an anarcho-syndicalist, was almost immediately arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis. In December 1933, after Rudolf’s release, the couple moved to Spain but they separated shortly afterwards. In Barcelona, Michaelis opened her own studio, Foto-elis. Collaborating with a group of architects, she produced documentary images of progressive architecture which were published in Catalan journals such as D’Ací i d’Allà and, after the start of the civil war, Nova Iberia.
After returning to Poland in 1937, she obtained a German passport, went to London and, in September 1939, emigrated to Australia, first working as a house maid in Sydney. In 1940, she opened her “Photo-studio”, becoming one of the few women photographers in Sydney. She specialised in portraits, especially of Europeans, Jews and people in the arts, many published in Australia and Australian Photography. A member of the photographers’ associations of New South Wales and Australia, in 1941 she was the only woman to join the Institute of Photographic Illustrators.
Margaret Michaelis’ photographic career came to an end in 1952 as a result of poor eyesight. In 1960, she married Albert George Sachs, a glass merchant. She died on 10 October 1985 in Melbourne.
Styles
In her early life, Michaelis used the sharp focus and sometimes unusual vantage points of modernist photography while her portraits sought to reveal the psychological essence of her sitters. Her portraits were primarily focused on capturing the lives of Jewish immigrants. Of particular significance is the small set of scenes from the Jewish market in Kraków taken in the 1930s. Helen Ennis of the National Gallery of Australia stated the images “carry the weight of history, offering a visual trace of a way of life that was destroyed by fascism.”
Michaelis was also fond of self-portraiture using the landscapes around Sydney and Melbourne as her backdrop.
Niu Weiyu (Chinese, b. 1927) The Handcrafts Group Organised by Families of Shanghai Business Owners Making Chinese Dolls 1956, printed later Gelatin silver print Image: 43.9 x 45.8cm (17 5/16 x 18 1/16 in.) Sheet: 60.9 x 50.8cm (24 x 20 in.) Frame: 60.96 x 60.96 cm (24 x 24 in.) Frame (outer): 63.5 x 63.5cm (25 x 25 in.) Gao Fan & Niu Weiyu Foundation
Niu Weiyu (Chinese: 牛畏予; born 1927 in Tanghe, Henan) is a Chinese photojournalist whose career started in the 1940s with coverage of the Chinese Communist Party’s wartime experiences and continued after 1949. She is praised for her photographs of ordinary workers and ethnic groups, and as one of the few women in photography, she specialised in female images.
She is a member of the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Photographers Association. Her husband, Gao Fan (1922-2004) was also a wartime and post-1949 photographer.
Niu Weiyu 牛畏予 (1927- ) is a native of Tanghe County, Henan Province. In the spring of 1945, she joined in revolution. She studied in Chinese People’s Anti-Japanese Military and Political College. In 1947, she served as Publicity Officer of Shanxi-Hebei-Shandong-Henan Military Region Political Department. In 1948, she served as a photographer of North China Pictorial. Later, she followed the Second Field Army to advance southwards, and worked as a photographer in Southwest Pictorial. In the early 1951, she was transferred to civilian work and served as a photographer of News Photography Bureau. She was the Head of photography team in North China Branch and Beijing Branch of Xinhua News Agency. In 1955, she began to serve as the central news photojournalist of Xinhua News Agency. In 1973, she was transferred to the post of photographer of foreign affairs team of Xinhua News Agency. In 1978, she began to serve as Head of photography team of Hong Kong Branch of Xinhua News Agency. She retired as a veteran cadre in 1982.
Anonymous text. “Niu Weiyu,” on the Photography of China website [Online] Cited 29/11/2021
Niu Weiyu (Chinese, b. 1927) Female Pilot 1952, printed 1988 Gelatin silver print Image: 43.8 x 33cm (17 1/4 x 13 in.) Frame: 60.96 x 50.8cm (24 x 20 in.) Frame (outer): 63.5 x 53.34cm (25 x 21 in.) Gao Fan & Niu Weiyu Foundation
Shu Ye (Chinese) Niu Weiyu with Camera c. 1960 Gelatin silver print Image: 15.4 x 7.1 cm (6 1/16 x 2 13/16 in.) Mount: 25.4 x 12.8 cm (10 x 5 1/16 in.) Frame: 45.72 x 35.56 cm (18 x 14 in.) Frame (outer): 48.26 x 38.1 cm (19 x 15 in.) Gao Fan & Niu Weiyu Foundation
Niu Weiyu (Chinese, b. 1927) Train, Bridge, Highway, and Elephant 1950s, printed later Gelatin silver print Image: 38.8 x 55.9cm (15 1/4 x 22 in.) Sheet: 50.8 x 60.9cm (20 x 24 in.) Frame: 50.8 x 60.9cm (20 x 24 in.) Gao Fan & Niu Weiyu Foundation
Niu Weiyu (Chinese, b. 1927) The First Beginning of Spring After Liberation, an International Women’s Day Celebration in front of the Temple of the Forbidden City 1949, printed 2017 Gelatin and silver bromide printing National Art Museum Collection of China Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
Behind the Camera
Women actively participated in the development of photography soon after its inception in the 19th century. Yet it was in the 1920s, after the seismic disruptions of World War I, that women entered the field of photography in force. Aided by advances in technology and mass communications, along with growing access to training and acceptance of their presence in the workplace, women around the world made an indelible mark on the growth and diversification of the medium. They brought innovation to a range of photographic disciplines, from avant-garde experimentation and commercial studio practice to social documentary, photojournalism, ethnography, and the recording of sports, dance, and fashion.
The New Woman
A global phenomenon, the New Woman of the 1920s embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art. Her image – a woman with bobbed hair, stylish dress, and a confident stride – was a staple of newspapers and magazines first in Europe and the United States and soon in China, Japan, India, Australia, and elsewhere. A symbol of the pursuit of liberation from traditional gender roles, the New Woman in her many guises represented women who faced a mix of opportunities and obstacles that varied from country to country. The camera became a powerful means for female photographers to assert their self-determination and redefine their position in society. Producing compelling portraits, including self-portraits featuring the artist with her camera, they established their roles as professionals and artists.
The Studio
Commercial studio photography was an important pathway for many women to forge a professional career and to earn their own income. Running successful businesses in small towns and major cities from Buenos Aires to Berlin and Istanbul, women reinvigorated the genre of portraiture. In the studio, both sitters and photographers navigated gender, race, and cultural difference; those run by women presented a different dynamic. For example, Black women operated studios in Chicago, New Orleans, and elsewhere in the United States, where they not only preserved likenesses and memories, but also constructed a counter narrative to racist images then circulating in the mass media.
The City
The availability of smaller, lightweight cameras and the increasing freedom to move about cities on their own spurred a number of women photographers to explore the diversity of the urban experience beyond the studio walls. Using their creative vision to capture the vibrant modern world around them, women living and working in Bombay (now Mumbai), London, New York, Paris, São Paulo, Tokyo, and beyond photographed soaring architecture and spontaneous encounters on the street.
Avant-Garde Experiments
Creative formal approaches – photomontage, photograms, sharp contrasts of light and shadow, unconventional cropping, extreme close-ups, and dizzying camera angles – came to define photography during this period. Women incorporated these cutting-edge techniques to produce works that conveyed the movement and energy of modern life. Although often overshadowed by their male partners and colleagues, women photographers were integral in shaping an avant-garde visual language that promoted new ways of seeing and experiencing the world.
Modern Bodies
Beginning in the 1920s, new concepts concerning health and sexuality, along with changing attitudes about movement and dress, emphasised the human body as a central site of experiencing modernity. Women photographers produced incisive visions of liberated modern bodies, from pioneering photographs of the nude to exuberant pictures of sport and dance. Photographs of joyous play and gymnastic exercise, as well as images of dancers in motion, celebrate the body as artistic medium.
Ethnographic Approaches
During this modern period, numerous women pursued professional photographic careers and traveled extensively for the first time. Many took photographs that documented their experiences abroad in Africa, China, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, while others engaged in more formal ethnographic projects. Some women with access to domains that were off limits to their male counterparts produced intimate portraits of female subjects. While gender may have afforded these photographers special connections to certain communities, it did not exempt some, especially those from Europe and the United States, from producing stereotypical views that reinforced hierarchical concepts of race and ethnocentrism.
Fashion and Advertising
Images splashed across the pages of popular fashion and lifestyle magazines vividly defined the New Woman. The unprecedented demand for fashion and advertising photographs between the world wars provided exceptional employment opportunities for fashion reporters, models, and photographers alike, allowing women to emerge as active agents in the profession. Cultivating the tastes of newly empowered female consumers, fashion and advertising photography provided a space where women could experiment with pictures intended for a predominantly female readership.
Social Documentary
Galvanised by the effects of a global economic crisis and the growing political and social unrest that began in the 1930s, numerous women photographers produced arresting images of the human condition. Whether working for government agencies or independently, women contributed to the visual record of the Depression and the events leading up to World War II. From images of breadlines and worker demonstrations to forced migration and internment, women photographers helped to expose dire conditions and shaped what would become known as social documentary photography.
Reportage
The rise of the picture press established photojournalism as a dominant form of visual expression during a period shaped by two world wars. Women photographers conveyed an inclusive view of worldwide economic depression, struggles for decolonisation in Africa, and the rise of fascism and communism in Europe and the Soviet Union. They often received the “soft assignments” of photographing women and children, families, and the home front, but some women risked their lives close to the front lines. Images of concentration camps and victory parades made way for the complexities of the postwar era, as seen in pictures of daily life in US-occupied Japan and the newly formed People’s Republic of China.
The photographers whose works are in The New Woman Behind the Camera represent just some of the many women around the world who were at the forefront of experimenting with the camera. They produced invaluable visual testimony that reflected both their personal experiences and the extraordinary social and political transformations of the early 20th century. Together, they changed the history of modern photography.
Text from the National Gallery of Art website
Nobuko Tsuchiura (Japanese, 1900-1998) Untitled (A doll) c. 1938 Gelatin silver print Image: 21.8 x 14.3cm (8 9/16 x 5 5/8 in.) Frame: 54.5 x 42.5cm (21 7/16 x 16 3/4 in.) Frame (outer): 56.3 x 44.1 x 2cm (22 3/16 x 17 3/8 x 13/16 in.) The Shoto Museum of Art, Tokyo
Nobuko Tsuchiura (1900-1998) was the first woman architect in Japan.
The wife of architect Kameki Tsuchiura, also an architect, she trained with Frank Lloyd Wright. The couple worked with Wright on the Imperial Hotel. They returned to the United States with Wright and worked for him for two years as draftsmen. After their return to Japan in 1929, they established their own architectural firm. Besides designing homes, the firm also experimented with furniture design. However, her work was always presented under her husband’s name, not her own. In 1937, she founded the Ladies’ Photo Club; at the time, photography was considered to be a more appropriate activity for women than architecture.
Sonya Noskowiak (American born Germany, 1900-1975) Ohne Titel (Untitled) c. 1930 Gelatin silver print Image: 24.13 x 17.78cm (9 1/2 x 7 in.) Frame: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.) Frame (outer): 53.34 x 43.18cm (21 x 17 in.) Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Sonya Noskowiak (American born Germany, 1900-1975)
Sonya Noskowiak (25 November 1900 – 28 April 1975) was a 20th-century German-American photographer and member of the San Francisco photography collective Group f/64 that included Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. She is considered an important figure in one of the great photographic movements of the twewntieth century. Throughout her career, Noskowiak photographed landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. Her most well-known, though unacknowledged, portraits are of the author John Steinbeck. In 1936, Noskowiak was awarded a prize at the annual exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists. She was also represented in the San Francisco Museum of Art’s “Scenes from San Francisco” exhibit in 1939. Ten years before her death, Noskowiak’s work was included in a WPA exhibition at the Oakland Museum in Oakland, California.
Tazue Sato Matsunaga (Japanese) Door 1938-1939 Gelatin silver print Image: 28.8 x 22.5cm (11 5/16 x 8 7/8 in.) Frame: 54.4 x 42.3cm (21 7/16 x 16 5/8 in.) Frame (outer): 56.3 x 44.1 x 2cm (22 3/16 x 17 3/8 x 13/16 in.) The Shoto Museum of Art, Tokyo
Thérèse Bonney (American, 1894-1978) Europe’s Children 1943 Bound volume Open: 29.85 x 44.45cm (11 3/4 x 17 1/2 in.) Closed: 29.85 x 22.23cm (11 3/4 x 8 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art Library, David K.E. Bruce Fund
Thérèse Bonney (American, 1894-1978)
Thérèse Bonney (born Mabel Bonney, Syracuse, New York, July 15, 1894 – Paris, France, January 15, 1978) was an American photographer and publicist. Bonney was best known for her images taken during World War II on the Russian-Finnish front. Her war effort earned her the decoration of the Croix de guerre in May 1941, and one of the five degrees the Légion d’honneur. She published several photo-essays, and was the subject of the 1944 True Comics issue “Photo-fighter”.
Career
Beginning in 1925, she thoroughly documented the French decorative arts through photography. At this time, most of the photographs were not taken by Bonney herself, but rather gathered from sources such as the collections of fellow photographers, photo agencies, architects, designers, stores, and various establishments. An ardent self-publicist, Bonney acquired the images directly from the Salon exhibitions, stores, manufacturers, architects, and designers of furniture, ceramics, jewellery, and other applied arts as well as architecture. She sold the photographic prints to various client-subscribers primarily in the U.S. (a small-effort precursor to today’s illustrated news agency) and charged fees for reproduction rights in a more traditional manner. She typed captions and glued them to the backs of the photographic prints. These photographs, sometimes garnered without permissions, were widely published – both with and without published credits.
She attended the 1930 “Stockholmsutstäliningen” (Stockholm Exhibition) and gathered photographs there. While in the Netherlands, she collected images of contemporary Dutch architecture.
After her decade-and-a-half activities in publicity and the photography of the decorative arts and architecture by others, Bonney took up photography herself and became a photojournalist. Her concerns with the ravages caused by World War II informed her images, which focused on civilians. Her early photographs focused at first on the individuals at the Russian-Finnish front. For her documentation of this demographic, she was granted the Order of the White Rose of Finland medal for bravery. She also traveled through western Europe during the war, taking photographs of children in dire conditions. A collection of the images were shown at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1940 and later published in her 1943 book Europe’s Children. Other activities included serving with the Croix-rouge (French International Red Cross).
Tina Modotti (American born Italy, 1896-1942) Campesinos (Farm Labourers) or Workers Parade 1926 Gelatin silver print Image: 21.43 x 18.57cm (8 7/16 x 7 5/16 in.) Mat: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.) Frame: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.) Frame (outer): 53.34 x 43.18cm (21 x 17 in.) Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Tina Modotti (American born Italy, 1896-1942)
Tina Modotti (born Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti Mondini, August 16/17, 1896 – January 5, 1942) was an Italian American photographer, model, actor, and revolutionary political activist for the Comintern. She left Italy in 1913 and moved to the USA, where she worked as a model and subsequently as a photographer. In 1922 she moved to Mexico, where she became an active Communist. …
Photography career
As a young girl in Italy her uncle, Pietro Modotti, maintained a photography studio. Later in the U.S., her father briefly ran a similar studio in San Francisco. While in Los Angeles, she met the photographer Edward Weston and his creative partner Margrethe Mather. It was through her relationship with Weston that Modotti developed as an important fine art photographer and documentarian. By 1921, Modotti was Weston’s lover. Ricardo Gómez Robelo became the head of Mexico’s Ministry of Education’s Fine Arts Department, and persuaded Robo to come to Mexico with a promise of a job and a studio.
Robo left for Mexico in December 1921. Perhaps unaware of his affair with Modotti, Robo took with him prints of Weston’s, hoping to mount an exhibition of his and Weston’s work in Mexico. While she was on her way to be with Robo, Modotti received word of his death from smallpox on February 9, 1922. Devastated, she arrived two days after his death. In March 1922, determined to see Robo’s vision realised, she mounted a two-week exhibition of Robo’s and Weston’s work at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Mexico City. She sustained a second loss with the death of her father, which forced her to return to San Francisco later in March 1922. In 1923, Modotti returned to Mexico City with Weston and his son Chandler, leaving behind Weston’s wife Flora and their youngest three children. She agreed to run Weston’s studio free of charge in return for his mentoring her in photography.
Together they opened a portrait studio in Mexico City. Modotti and Weston quickly gravitated toward the capital’s bohemian scene and used their connections to create an expanding portrait business. Together they found a community of cultural and political “avant-gardists”, which included Frida Kahlo, Lupe Marín, Diego Rivera, and Jean Charlot. In general, Weston was moved by the landscape and folk art of Mexico to create abstract works, while Modotti was more captivated by the people of Mexico and blended this human interest with a modernist aesthetic. Modotti also became the photographer of choice for the blossoming Mexican mural movement, documenting the works of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. Between 1924 and 1928, Modotti took hundreds of photographs of Rivera’s murals at the Secretariat of Public Education in Mexico City. Modotti’s visual vocabulary matured during this period, such as her formal experiments with architectural interiors, blooming flowers, urban landscapes, and especially in her many beautiful images of peasants and workers during the depression. In 1926, Modotti and Weston were commissioned by Anita Brenner to travel around Mexico and take photographs for what would become her influential book Idols Behind Altars. The relative contributions of Modotti and Weston to the project has been debated. Weston’s son Brett, who accompanied the two on the project, indicated that the photographs were taken by Edward Weston.
In 1925, Modotti joined International Red Aid, a Communist organisation. In November 1926, Weston left Mexico and returned to California. During this time Modotti met several political radicals and Communists, including three Mexican Communist Party leaders who would all eventually become romantically linked with her: Xavier Guerrero, Julio Antonio Mella, and Vittorio Vidali.
Starting in 1927, a much more politically active Modotti (she joined the Mexican Communist Party that year) found her focus shifting and more of her work becoming politically motivated. Around that time her photographs began appearing in publications such as Mexican Folkways, Forma, and the more radically motivated El Machete, the German Communist Party’s Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ), and New Masses.
Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo divided Modotti’s career as a photographer into two distinct categories: “Romantic” and “Revolutionary”, with the former period including her time spent as Weston’s darkroom assistant, office manager and, finally, creative partner. Her later works were the focus of her one-woman retrospective exhibition at the National Library in December 1929, which was advertised as “The First Revolutionary Photographic Exhibition In Mexico”.
Toni Frissell (American, 1907-1988) Untitled (Model Natalie Nickerson Paine wearing a bikini, Montego Bay, Jamaica) 1946 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 27.2 x 26cm (10 11/16 x 10 1/4 in.) Mat: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.) Frame: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.) Frame (outer): 53.34 x 43.18cm (21 x 17 in.) Toni Frissell Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Toni Frissell (American, 1907-1988)
Antoinette Frissell Bacon (March 10, 1907 – April 17, 1988), known as Toni Frissell, was an American photographer, known for her fashion photography, World War II photographs, and portraits of famous Americans, Europeans, children, and women from all walks of life. …
World War II
In 1941, Frissell volunteered her photographic services to the American Red Cross. Later she worked for the Eighth Army Air Force and became the official photographer of the Women’s Army Corps. On their behalf, she took thousands of images of nurses, front-line soldiers, WACs, African-American airmen, and orphaned children.
She travelled to the European front twice. Her first picture to be published in Life magazine was of bombed out London in 1942. Her moving photographs of military women and African American fighter pilots in the elite 332d Fighter Group (the “Tuskegee Airmen”) were used to encourage public support for women and African Americans in the military.
During the War she produced a series of photographs of children that were used in an edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s much-published A child’s garden of verses which were an early example of the successful use of photography in illustration of children’s literature.
Toni Frissell (American, 1907-1988) Untitled (William A. Campbell and Thurston L. Gaines, Jr., members of the 332nd Fighter Group in Ramitelli, Italy, March 1945) 1945 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 35.5 x 28.4cm (14 x 11 3/16 in.) Mat: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.) Frame: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.) Frame (outer): 53.34 x 43.18cm (21 x 17 in.) Toni Frissell Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
National Gallery of Art National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets Constitution Avenue NW, Washington
Curator: The exhibition is curated by Andrea Nelson, associate curator in the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Marvin Breckinridge Patterson (American, 1905-2002) Frontier Nursing Service, Kentucky 1937 Gelatin silver print Sheet (trimmed to image): 24.2 x 18.8cm (9 1/2 x 7 3/8 in.) Frame: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.) Frame (outer): 53.34 x 43.18cm (21 x 17 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Marvin Breckinridge Patterson
The first of a humungous three-part posting on this archaeological exhibition.
Combined with the posting I did on this exhibition when it was on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, this three-part posting will include over 160 new images from the exhibition… meaning a combined total over the four postings of over 200 images with biographical information.
This has been a mammoth effort to construct these postings but so worthwhile!
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Renata Bracksieck (German, 1900-1992) Karnevalslichter (Carnival Lights) 1920s-1930s Gelatin silver print sheet (trimmed to image): 23.8 x 17.8cm (9 3/8 x 7 in.) Frame: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.) Frame (outer): 55.25 x 45.09cm (21 3/4 x 17 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Renata Bracksieck (German, 1900-1992) was trained as a fashion designer at Christoph Drecoll’s in Berlin, and afterwards ran her own successful fashion studio in Bremen. She started taking photographs in 1929, but had been experimenting with and assisting her close friend and future husband Werner Rohde before. Her photographs were featured in the international exhibition Das Lichtbild in Munich in 1930. In 1937 she married Werner Rohde and subsequently was called Renata Bracksieck-Rohde. After he returned from a POW camp in 1945, they moved to the artist colony Worpswede near the city of Bremen, where they continued to live until their deaths.
Text from the Kicken Berlin website
Lotte Jacobi (American, 1896-1990) Lieselotte Felger, die Wespentaille in dem Tanz, der Kreisel, Berlin (Lieselotte Felger as “Die Wespentaille” in the Dance “Der Kreisel,” Berlin) 1931 Gelatin silver print sheet (trimmed to image): 25.2 x 20.2cm (9 15/16 x 7 15/16 in.) Frame: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.) Frame (outer): 53.34 x 43.18cm (21 x 17 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Lotte Jacobi (August 17, 1896 – May 6, 1990) was a leading American portrait photographer and photojournalist, known for her high-contrast black-and-white portrait photography, characterised by intimate, sometimes dramatic, sometimes idiosyncratic and often definitive humanist depictions of both ordinary people in the United States and Europe and some of the most important artists, thinkers and activists of the 20th century.
Yva (Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon) (German, 1900-1944) Ohne Titel (Schmuck) (Untitled (Jewellery)) c. 1930 Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 22.7 x 16.2 cm (8 15/16 x 6 3/8 in.) Frame: 45.72 x 35.56 cm (18 x 14 in.) Frame (outer): 50.17 x 40.01 cm (19 3/4 x 15 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Yva (26 January 1900 – 31 December 1944) was the professional pseudonym of Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon who was a German Jewish photographer renowned for her dreamlike, multiple exposed images. She became a leading photographer in Berlin during the Weimar Republic.
When the Nazi Party came to power, she was forced into working as a radiographer. She was deported by the Gestapo in 1942 and murdered, probably in the Majdanek concentration camp during World War II.
Yva (Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon) (German, 1900-1944) Ohne Titel (Schmuck) (Untitled (Jewellery)) c. 1930 Gelatin silver print Image: 19.05 x 15.24cm (7 1/2 x 6 in.) Frame: 45.72 x 35.56cm (18 x 14 in.) Frame (outer): 50.17 x 40.01cm (19 3/4 x 15 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection Gift of the Women’s Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Brenda and Robert Edelson Collection
Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998) Study for “Salut de Schiaparelli” (Lily Perfume), Paris 1934 Gelatin silver print Overall: 28.2 x 22.3cm (11 1/8 x 8 3/4 in.) Frame: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.) Frame (outer): 53.34 x 43.18cm (21 x 17 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Ilse Bing Wolff
During the 1920s, the iconic New Woman was splashed across the pages of magazines and projected on the silver screen. As a global phenomenon, she embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art. Featuring more than 120 photographers from over 20 countries, the groundbreaking exhibition, The New Woman Behind the Camera, explores the diverse “new” women who embraced photography as a mode of professional and personal expression from the 1920s to the 1950s. The first exhibition to take an international approach to the subject, it examines how women brought their own perspectives to artistic experimentation, studio portraiture, fashion and advertising work, scenes of urban life, ethnography, and photojournalism, profoundly shaping the medium during a time of tremendous social and political change. Accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, this landmark exhibition will be on view from October 31, 2021 through January 30, 2022, in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, Washington. It was previously on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from July 2 through October 3, 2021.
In an era when traditional definitions of womanhood were being questioned, women’s lives were a mix of emancipating and confining experiences that varied by country. Many women around the world found the camera to be a means of independence as they sought to redefine their positions in society and expand their rights. This exhibition presents a geographically, culturally, and artistically diverse range of practitioners to advance new conversations about the history of modern photography and the continual struggle of women to gain creative agency and self-representation.
“This innovative exhibition reevaluates the history of modern photography through the lens of the New Woman, a feminist ideal that emerged at the end of the 19th century and spread globally during the first half of the 20th century,” said Kaywin Feldman, director, National Gallery of Art. “The transnational realities of modernism visualised in photography by women such as Lola Álvarez Bravo, Berenice Abbott, Claude Cahun, Germaine Krull, Dorothea Lange, Niu Weiyu, Tsuneko Sasamoto, and Homai Vyarawalla offer us an opportunity to better understand the present by becoming more fully informed of the past.”
About the exhibition
This landmark exhibition critically examines the extraordinary impact women had on the practice of photography worldwide from the 1920s to the 1950s. It presents the work of over 120 international photographers who took part in a dramatic expansion of the medium propelled by artistic creativity, technological innovation, and the rise of the printed press. Photographers such as Berenice Abbott, Ilse Bing, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Madame d’Ora, Florence Henri, Elizaveta Ignatovich, Germaine Krull, Dorothea Lange, Dora Maar, Niu Weiyu, Eslanda Goode Robeson, Tsuneko Sasamoto, Gerda Taro, and Homai Vyarawalla, among many others, emerged at a tumultuous moment in history that was profoundly shaped by two world wars, a global economic depression, struggles for decolonisation, and the rise of fascism and communism. Against the odds, these women were at the forefront of experimentation with the camera and produced invaluable visual testimony that reflects both their personal experiences and the extraordinary social and political transformations of the era.
Organised thematically in eight galleries, The New Woman Behind the Camera illustrates women’s groundbreaking work in modern photography, exploring their innovations in the fields of social documentary, avant-garde experimentation, commercial studio practice, photojournalism, ethnography, and the recording of sports, dance, and fashion. By evoking the global phenomenon of the New Woman, the exhibition seeks to reevaluate the history of photography and advance new and more inclusive conversations on the contributions of female photographers.
Known by different names, from nouvelle femme and neue Frau to modan gāru and xin nüxing, the New Woman was easy to recognise but hard to define. Fashionably dressed with her hair bobbed, the self-assured cosmopolitan New Woman was arguably more than a marketable image. She was a contested symbol of liberation from traditional gender roles. Revealing how women photographers from around the world gave rise to and embodied the quintessential New Woman even as they critiqued the popular construction of the role, the exhibition opens with a group of compelling portraits and self-portraits. In these works, women defined their positions as professionals and artists during a time when they were seeking greater personal rights and freedoms.
For many women, the camera became an effective tool for self-determination as well as a source of income. With better access to education and a newfound independence, female photographers emerged as a major force in studio photography. From running successful businesses in Berlin, Buenos Aires, London, and Vienna, to earning recognition as one of the first professional female photographers in their home country, women around the world, including Karimeh Abbud, Steffi Brandl, Trude Fleischmann, Annemarie Heinrich, Eiko Yamazawa, and Madame Yevonde, reinvigorated studio practice. A collaborative space where both sitters and photographers negotiated gender, race, and cultural difference, the portrait studio was also vitally important to African American communities which sought to represent and define themselves within a society that continued to be plagued by racism. Photography studios run by Black women, such as Florestine Perrault Collins and Winifred Hall Allen, thrived throughout the United States, and not only preserved likenesses and memories, but also constructed a counter narrative to the stereotyping images that circulated in the mass media.
With the invention of smaller lightweight cameras, a growing number of women photographers found that the camera’s portability created new avenues of discovery outside the studio. In stunning photographs of the city, photographers such as Alice Brill, Rebecca Lepkoff, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, Genevieve Naylor, and Tazue Satō Matsunaga used their artistic vision to capture the exhilarating modern world around them. They depicted everyday life, spontaneous encounters on the street, and soaring architectural views in places like Bombay (now Mumbai), New York, Paris, São Paulo, and Tokyo, revealing the multiplicity of urban experience. Many incorporated the newest photographic techniques to convey the energy of the city, and the exhibition continues with a gallery focused on those radical formal approaches that came to define modern photography. Through techniques like photomontage, photograms, sharp contrasts of light and shadow, extreme cropping, and dizzying camera angles, women including Aenne Biermann, Imogen Cunningham, Dora Maar, Tina Modotti, Lucia Moholy, and Cami Stone pushed the boundaries of the medium.
Women also produced dynamic pictures of the modern body, including innovative nude studies as well as sport and dance photography. Around the world, participation in spectator and team sports increased along with membership in fitness and hygiene reform movements. New concepts concerning health and sexuality along with new attitudes in movement and dress emphasised the body as a central site of experiencing modernity. On view are luminous works by photographers Laure Albin Guillot, Yvonne Chevalier, Florence Henri, and Jeanne Mandello who reimagined the traditional genre of the nude. Photographs by Irene Bayer-Hecht and Liselotte Grschebina highlight joyous play and gymnastic exercise, while Charlotte Rudolph, Ilse Bing, Trude Fleischmann, and Lotte Jacobi made breathtaking images of dancers in motion, revealing the body as artistic medium.
During the modern period, a growing number of women pursued professional photographic careers and traveled widely for the first time. Many took photographs that documented their experiences abroad and interactions with other cultures as they engaged in formal and informal ethnographic projects. The exhibition continues with a selection of photographs and photobooks by women, mainly from Europe and the United States, that reveal a diversity of perspectives and approaches. Gender provided some of these photographers with unusual access and the drive to challenge discriminatory practices, while others were not exempt from portraying stereotypical views. Publications by Jette Bang, Hélène Hoppenot, Ella Maillart, Anna Riwkin, Eslanda Goode Robeson, and Ellen Thorbecke exemplify how photographically illustrated books and magazines were an influential form of communication about travel and ethnography during the modern period. Other works on display include those by Denise Bellon and Ré Soupault, who traveled to foreign countries on assignment for magazines and photo agencies seeking ethnographic and newsworthy photographs, and those by Marjorie Content and Laura Gilpin, who worked on their own in the southwestern United States.
The New Woman – both as a mass-circulating image and as a social phenomenon – was confirmed by the explosion of photographs found in popular fashion and lifestyle magazines. Fashion and advertising photography allowed many women to gain unprecedented access to the public sphere, establish relative economic independence, and attain autonomous professional success. Producing a rich visual language where events and ideas were expressed directly in pictures, illustrated fashion magazines such as Die Dame, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue became an important venue for photographic experimentation by women for a female readership. Photographers producing original views of women’s modernity include Lillian Bassman, Ilse Bing, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Toni Frissell, Toni von Horn, Frances McLaughlin-Gill, ringl + pit, Margaret Watkins, Caroline Whiting Fellows, and Yva.
The rise of the picture press also established photojournalism and social documentary as dominant forms of visual expression during the modern period. Ignited by the effects of a global economic crisis and growing political and social unrest, numerous women photographers including Lucy Ashjian, Margaret Bourke-White, Kati Horna, Elizaveta Ignatovich, Kata Kálmán, Dorothea Lange, and Hansel Mieth engaged a wide public with gripping images. So-called soft topics such as “women and children,” “the family,” and “the home front” were more often assigned to female photojournalists than to their male counterparts. The exhibition asks viewers to question the effect of having women behind the camera in these settings. Pictures produced during the war, from combat photography by Galina Sanko and Gerda Taro to images of the Blitz in London by Thérèse Bonney and the Tuskegee airmen by Toni Frissell, are also featured. At the war’s end, haunting images by Lee Miller of the opening of Nazi concentration camps and celebratory images of the victory parade of Allied Forces in New Delhi by Homai Vyarawalla made way for the transition to the complexities of the postwar era, including images of daily life in US-occupied Japan by Tsuneko Sasamoto and the newly formed People’s Republic of China by Hou Bo and Niu Weiyu.
The New Woman Behind the Camera acknowledges that women are a diverse group whose identities are defined not exclusively by gender but rather by a host of variable factors. It contends that gender is an important aspect in understanding their lives and work and provides a useful framework for analysis to reveal how photography by women has powerfully shaped our understanding of modern life.
Exhibition catalog
Published by the National Gallery of Art, Washington and distributed by DelMonico Books | D.A.P., this groundbreaking, richly illustrated 288-page catalog examines the diverse women whose work profoundly marked the medium of photography from the 1920s to the 1950s. The book – featuring over 120 international photographers, including Lola Álvarez Bravo, Elizaveta Ignatovich, Germaine Krull, Dorothea Lange, Tsuneko Sasamoto, and Homai Vyarawalla – reevaluates the history of modern photography through the lens of the iconic New Woman. Inclusive scholarly essays introduce readers to these important photographers and question the past assumptions about gender in the history of photography. Contributors include Andrea Nelson, associate curator in the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art; Elizabeth Cronin, assistant curator of photography in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, New York Public Library; Mia Fineman, curator in the department of photographs, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Mila Ganeva, professor of German in the department of German, Russian, Asian, and Middle Eastern languages and cultures, Miami University, Ohio; Kristen Gresh, Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Elizabeth Otto, professor of modern and contemporary art history, University at Buffalo (The State University of New York); and Kim Sichel, associate professor in the department of the history of art and architecture at Boston University; biographies of the photographers by Kara Felt, Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art.
Press release from the National Gallery of Art
Olga Máté (Hungarian, 1878-1961) Horgász-stég (Fisherman’s Dock) c. 1930 Gelatin silver print Overall: 22.38 x 17.46cm (8 13/16 x 6 7/8 in.) Frame: 45.72 x 35.56cm (18 x 14 in.) Frame (outer): 48.26 x 38.1cm (19 x 15 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Olga Máté (1878-1961) was one of the first women Hungarian photographers, most known for her portraits. She was known for her lighting techniques and used lighted backgrounds to enhance her portraits and still life compositions. In 1912 she won a gold medal in Stuttgart at an international photography exhibit. Perhaps her best-known images are portraits she took of Mihály Babits and Margit Kaffka. She was also an early suffragist in Hungary and during the Hungarian White Terror assisted several intellectuals in their escapes.
Kata Kálmán (Hungarian, 1909-1978) Weisz Ernö 23 éves gyári munkás, Budapest (Ernö Weisz, 23-Year-Old Factory Worker, Budapest) 1932, printed before 1955 Gelatin silver print image: 24.2 x 17.6cm (9 1/2 x 6 15/16 in.) Frame: 45.72 x 35.56cm (18 x 14 in.) Frame (outer): 48.26 x 38.1cm (19 x 15 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Marianne Brandt (German, 1893-1983) Ohne Titel (Untitled) 1930 Photomontage on paper Overall: 65 x 50.1cm (25 9/16 x 19 3/4 in.) Frame: 89.22 x 73.98 x 4.13cm (35 1/8 x 29 1/8 x 1 5/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund, R. K. Mellon Family Foundation, and Thomas Walther
Marianne Brandt (1 October 1893 – 18 June 1983) was a German painter, sculptor, photographer, metalsmith, and designer who studied at the Bauhaus art school in Weimar and later became head of the Bauhaus Metall-Werkstatt (Metal Workshop) in Dessau in 1927. Today, Brandt’s designs for household objects such as lamps, ashtrays and teapots are considered timeless examples of modern industrial design. She also created photomontages. …
Brandt is also remembered as a pioneering photographer. She created experimental still-life compositions, but it is her series of self-portraits which are particularly striking. These often represent her as a strong and independent New Woman of the Bauhaus; other examples show her face and body distorted across the curved and mirrored surfaces of metal balls, creating a blended image of herself and her primary medium at the Bauhaus. Brandt was one of few women at Bauhaus who distanced herself from the fields considered more feminine at the time such as weaving or pottery.
Rosalie Gwathmey (American, 1908-2001) Tobacco Picker, Rocky Mount, North Carolina 1943 Gelatin silver print Image: 25.56 x 34.13cm (10 1/16 x 13 7/16 in.) Frame: 40.64 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.) Frame (outer): 43.18 x 53.34cm (17 x 21 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon and Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Rosalie Gwathmey or Rosalie Hook (September 15, 1908 – February 12, 2001) was an American painter and photographer known for her photos of black southern communities around her hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. …
Her photography was known for capturing the lives of residents of Southern African American communities. She focused on black life in her home of Charlotte and Rocky Mount, North Carolina. She photographed many of the black sharecroppers and southern townscapes that became the basis of her husband’s paintings. While Rosalie’s social documentary photographs offer no stylistic revolution, her life and art reflect significant issues relating to politics and race relations in the United States during the 1940s. While in the Photo League, she worked with many radical photographers of the era: Paul Strand, Aaron Siskind, Sid Grossman, Dorothea Lange, Bernice Abbott, Lizette Modell, Walter Rosenblum, Dan Weiner, and Lou Stettner.
Marjorie Content (1895-1984) was an American photographer from New York City active in modernist social and artistic circles. Her photographs were rarely published and never exhibited in her lifetime. Since the late 20th century, collectors and art historians have taken renewed interest in her work. Her photographs have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Chrysler Museum of Art; her work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions.
She was married several times, including for a short period to Harold Loeb, a writer and the editor of the avant-garde journal, Broom. Her marriage to writer Jean Toomer in 1934 lasted more than 30 years, to his death. …
Photographic years (1926-1935)
Content began serious photography while married to her second husband, the painter Michael Carr. She used a 3+1⁄4 × 4+1⁄4 inch Graflex, and, after 1932, a 5×7 inch Graflex as well. Despite reports that Stieglitz taught her developing techniques, some scholars believe it was her friend Consuelo Kanaga. Content sometimes worked in Kanaga’s darkroom.
Her travels in the West and Southwest with painter Gordon Grant influenced her style toward a more formalist aesthetic. She briefly worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs photographing rural Native American life. She married a third time, to Leon Fleischman.
In the 1930s Content was also close to painter Georgia O’Keeffe. In 1933 she traveled with her to Bermuda to nurse her through a depression. The following year, she drove with her to New Mexico, where O’Keefe had settled. Other close friends of this period included Stieglitz, Ridge, Sherwood Anderson, Paul Rosenfeld, and Margaret Naumburg, at whose Walden School in New York City both of her children were educated.
Madame d’Ora (Austrian, 1881-1963) Mariette Pachhofer (later Mariette Lydis) 1921 Gelatin silver print image: 21.9 x 13.9cm (8 5/8 x 5 1/2 in.) Mount: 38.7 x 26.4cm (15 1/4 x 10 3/8 in.) Frame: 40.64 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.) Frame (outer): 44.45 x 54.61cm (17 1/2 x 21 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund and the R. K. Mellon Family Foundation
Madame d’Ora (Austrian, 1881-1963)
Dora Philippine Kallmus (20 March 1881 – 28 October 1963), also known as Madame D’Ora or Madame d’Ora, was an Austrian fashion and portrait photographer.
Dora Philippine Kallmus was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1881 to a Jewish family. Her father was a lawyer. Her sister, Anna, was born in 1878 and deported in 1941 during the Holocaust. Although her mother, Malvine (née Sonnenberg), died when she was young, her family remained an important source of emotional and financial support throughout her career.
She became interested in the photography field while assisting the son of the painter Hans Makart, and in 1905 she was the first woman to be admitted to theory courses at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt (Graphic Training Institute). That same year she became a member of the Association of Austrian photographers. At that time she was also the first woman allowed to study theory at the Graphischen Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, which in 1908 granted women access to other courses in photography.
In 1907, she established her own studio with Arthur Benda in Vienna called the Atelier d’Ora or Madame D’Ora-Benda. The name was based on the pseudonym “Madame d’Ora”, which she used professionally. D’ora and Benda operated a summer studio from 1921 to 1926 in Karlsbad, Germany, and opened another gallery in Paris in 1925. She was represented by Schostal Photo Agency (Agentur Schostal) and it was her intervention that saved the agency’s owner after his arrest by the Nazis, enabling him to flee to Paris from Vienna.
Her subjects included Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, Tamara de Lempicka, Alban Berg, Maurice Chevalier, Colette, and other dancers, actors, painters, and writers.
Alma Ruth Lavenson (May 20, 1897, in San Francisco – September 19, 1989 in Piedmont, California) was an American photographer of the early 20th century. She worked with and was a close friend of Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston and other photographic masters of the period.
Rogi André (French born Hungary, 1900-1970) Dora Maar 1941 Gelatin silver print Image: 17 x 11.9cm (6 11/16 x 4 11/16 in.) Mount: 28 x 20cm (11 x 7 7/8 in.) Frame: 45.72 x 35.56cm (18 x 14 in.) rame (outer): 49.53 x 39.37cm (19 1/2 x 15 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund
Rogi André (born Rozsa Klein, 10 August 1900, Budapest – 11 April 1970, Paris) was a Hungarian-born French photographer and artist. She was the first wife of André Kertész. …
In 1935, the photographer and theoretician of photography Emmanuel Sougez, writing in the journal Arts et Métiers Graphique compared the photography of Rogi André and that of Laure Albin Guillot, and criticised the former for posing her subjects in their environment. Some critics have noted in her portraits an influence of Cubism, for example in the portrait of Dora Maar (c. 1940) in which she creates a geometric composition using the play of shadows and lights.
Anna Barna (Hungarian, 1901-1964) Leskelodo (Onlooker) 1930s Gelatin silver print Image: 22.6 x 16.9cm (8 7/8 x 6 5/8 in.) Frame: 45.72 x 35.56cm (18 x 14 in.) Frame (outer): 48.26 x 38.1cm (19 x 15 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund
Behind the Camera
Women actively participated in the development of photography soon after its inception in the 19th century. Yet it was in the 1920s, after the seismic disruptions of World War I, that women entered the field of photography in force. Aided by advances in technology and mass communications, along with growing access to training and acceptance of their presence in the workplace, women around the world made an indelible mark on the growth and diversification of the medium. They brought innovation to a range of photographic disciplines, from avant-garde experimentation and commercial studio practice to social documentary, photojournalism, ethnography, and the recording of sports, dance, and fashion.
The New Woman
A global phenomenon, the New Woman of the 1920s embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art. Her image – a woman with bobbed hair, stylish dress, and a confident stride – was a staple of newspapers and magazines first in Europe and the United States and soon in China, Japan, India, Australia, and elsewhere. A symbol of the pursuit of liberation from traditional gender roles, the New Woman in her many guises represented women who faced a mix of opportunities and obstacles that varied from country to country. The camera became a powerful means for female photographers to assert their self-determination and redefine their position in society. Producing compelling portraits, including self-portraits featuring the artist with her camera, they established their roles as professionals and artists.
The Studio
Commercial studio photography was an important pathway for many women to forge a professional career and to earn their own income. Running successful businesses in small towns and major cities from Buenos Aires to Berlin and Istanbul, women reinvigorated the genre of portraiture. In the studio, both sitters and photographers navigated gender, race, and cultural difference; those run by women presented a different dynamic. For example, Black women operated studios in Chicago, New Orleans, and elsewhere in the United States, where they not only preserved likenesses and memories, but also constructed a counter narrative to racist images then circulating in the mass media.
The City
The availability of smaller, lightweight cameras and the increasing freedom to move about cities on their own spurred a number of women photographers to explore the diversity of the urban experience beyond the studio walls. Using their creative vision to capture the vibrant modern world around them, women living and working in Bombay (now Mumbai), London, New York, Paris, São Paulo, Tokyo, and beyond photographed soaring architecture and spontaneous encounters on the street.
Avant-Garde Experiments
Creative formal approaches – photomontage, photograms, sharp contrasts of light and shadow, unconventional cropping, extreme close-ups, and dizzying camera angles – came to define photography during this period. Women incorporated these cutting-edge techniques to produce works that conveyed the movement and energy of modern life. Although often overshadowed by their male partners and colleagues, women photographers were integral in shaping an avant-garde visual language that promoted new ways of seeing and experiencing the world.
Modern Bodies
Beginning in the 1920s, new concepts concerning health and sexuality, along with changing attitudes about movement and dress, emphasised the human body as a central site of experiencing modernity. Women photographers produced incisive visions of liberated modern bodies, from pioneering photographs of the nude to exuberant pictures of sport and dance. Photographs of joyous play and gymnastic exercise, as well as images of dancers in motion, celebrate the body as artistic medium.
Ethnographic Approaches
During this modern period, numerous women pursued professional photographic careers and traveled extensively for the first time. Many took photographs that documented their experiences abroad in Africa, China, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, while others engaged in more formal ethnographic projects. Some women with access to domains that were off limits to their male counterparts produced intimate portraits of female subjects. While gender may have afforded these photographers special connections to certain communities, it did not exempt some, especially those from Europe and the United States, from producing stereotypical views that reinforced hierarchical concepts of race and ethnocentrism.
Fashion and Advertising
Images splashed across the pages of popular fashion and lifestyle magazines vividly defined the New Woman. The unprecedented demand for fashion and advertising photographs between the world wars provided exceptional employment opportunities for fashion reporters, models, and photographers alike, allowing women to emerge as active agents in the profession. Cultivating the tastes of newly empowered female consumers, fashion and advertising photography provided a space where women could experiment with pictures intended for a predominantly female readership.
Social Documentary
Galvanised by the effects of a global economic crisis and the growing political and social unrest that began in the 1930s, numerous women photographers produced arresting images of the human condition. Whether working for government agencies or independently, women contributed to the visual record of the Depression and the events leading up to World War II. From images of breadlines and worker demonstrations to forced migration and internment, women photographers helped to expose dire conditions and shaped what would become known as social documentary photography.
Reportage
The rise of the picture press established photojournalism as a dominant form of visual expression during a period shaped by two world wars. Women photographers conveyed an inclusive view of worldwide economic depression, struggles for decolonisation in Africa, and the rise of fascism and communism in Europe and the Soviet Union. They often received the “soft assignments” of photographing women and children, families, and the home front, but some women risked their lives close to the front lines. Images of concentration camps and victory parades made way for the complexities of the postwar era, as seen in pictures of daily life in US-occupied Japan and the newly formed People’s Republic of China.
The photographers whose works are in The New Woman Behind the Camera represent just some of the many women around the world who were at the forefront of experimenting with the camera. They produced invaluable visual testimony that reflected both their personal experiences and the extraordinary social and political transformations of the early 20th century. Together, they changed the history of modern photography.
Text from the National Gallery of Art website
Constance Stuart Larrabee (English, 1914-2000) Johannesburg Social Center, South Africa 1948, printed later Gelatin silver print Sheet: 50.8 x 40.48cm (20 x 15 15/16 in.) Image: 43.18 x 37.94cm (17 x 14 15/16 in.) Frame: 60.96 x 50.8cm (24 x 20 in.) Frame (outer): 62.23 x 52.07cm (24 1/2 x 20 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase)
Constance Stuart Larrabee (English, 1914-2000)
Constance Stuart Larrabee (7 August 1914 – 27 July 2000) was an English photographer best known for her images of South Africa and her photo-journalism on Europe during World War II. She was South Africa’s first female war correspondent. …
Career
On her return to South Africa in 1936 she established the Constance Stuart Portrait Studio in Pretoria. She became a renowned portraitist, and photographed many of the leading statesmen, generals, artists, writers, society and theatrical personalities of that period. In 1946 she opened a second studio in Johannesburg.
Between 1937 and 1949 Stuart developed her lifelong interest in recording and exhibiting the vanishing ethnic cultures of South Africa: the Ndebele, Bushmen, Lobedu, Zulu, Swazi, Sotho and Transkei peoples. Some of them she took during the visit of the British Royals to South Africa in 1947. Stuart was the official photographer of the royal tour, and while traveling throughout Basutoland (Lesotho), Swaziland and Bechuanaland (Botswana), which were at the time the three British protectorates in South Africa. She photographed tribal people dressed up for the occasion in their native costumes. She exhibited these photographs, and many like them in Preotria, Johannesburg and Cape Town, which led to her appointment as South Africa’s first woman war correspondent for Libertas magazine. Between 1945 and 1955 she served in Egypt, Italy, France and England, attached to the American 7th Army and the South African 6th Division in the Italian Apennines. Although she had only been hired to photograph the South African troops in the army, Stuart went well beyond her assignment. She photographed the American, French, British and Canadian troops as well as her South African countrymen. She also photographed the civilians the soldiers met on the way to Germany, and she photographed the devastated villages, towns and cities in their path. As a female war correspondent Stuart was often held back from the front for days, and as she was billeted separately from her male co-workers the facilities available to her were often uncomfortable. She took all the difficulties in stride, accepting them as part of the war, and quickly gained the respect of the people around her. One co-worker wrote: ‘Constance Stuart… has made a fine art of getting around the fronts. She has seen more of war than any other woman I have met.’
Although she was not permitted to keep a diary on the front, she compiled her photographic notes and letters into a memoir named Jeep Trek, published in 1946.
When she returned to South Africa in 1945 she travelled throughout the country exhibiting many of these photographs, as well as her depictions of South African tribal people. In 1948, the National Party came to power in South Africa and instituted a policy of strict racial segregation. The following year, Stuart left South Africa for America.
Constance Stuart Larrabee (English, 1914-2000) Untitled (Collaborators, St. Tropez, France) 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed later Image: 39.53 x 38.1cm (15 9/16 x 15 in.) Sheet: 50.32 x 40.48cm (19 13/16 x 15 15/16 in.) Frame: 60.96 x 50.8 cm (24 x 20 in.) Frame (outer): 62.23 x 52.07cm (24 1/2 x 20 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection Gift of the Artist, Constance Stuart Larrabee WWII Collection
Margaret De Patta (American, 1903-1964) Untitled 1939 Gelatin silver print Image: 17.8 x 21.9cm (7 x 8 5/8 in.) Frame: 40.64 x 50.8cm (16 x 20 in.) Frame (outer): 53.34 x 43.18cm (21 x 17 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
“I find work problems as set for myself fall into these main directions: space articulation, movement to a purpose, visual explorations with transparencies, reflective surfaces, negative positive relationships, structures and new materials. A single piece may incorporate one or many of these ideas. Problems common to sculpture and architecture are inherent in jewellery design, i.e. – space, form, tension, organic structure, scale, texture, interpenetration, superimposition and economy of means – each necessary element playing its role in a unified entity.”
~ Margaret De Patta (Design Quarterly #33)
Cami Stone (Belgian, 1892-1975) Ohne Titel (Nachtaufnahme, Berlin) (Untitled (Night shot, Berlin)) c. 1929 Gelatin silver print Image: 9.5 x 14cm (3 3/4 x 5 1/2 in.) Frame: 30.48 x 40.64cm (12 x 16 in.) Frame (outer): 33.02 x 43.18cm (13 x 17 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Ringl and Pit were the childhood nicknames of Grete Stern (Ringl) and Ellen Auerbach (Pit). Together, they established a photography studio in 1930 in Berlin. Both studied privately with Walter Peterhans, a photography instructor at the Bauhaus, whose promulgation of a highly rationalized style of advertising photography – one that signified “machine made” in its emphasis on sleek form and graphic design – was proposed as a solution to the question of art’s role in industrial society. …
In their representation of the “modern woman,” a new social type emerging out of the political upheaval of the Weimar Republic, the duo employed visual strategies subversive to traditional conceptions of woman. Often using mannequins, wigs, and other symbols of femininity, Stern and Auerbach worked to question the artifice and masquerade of feminine identity.
Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern met as private students of Bauhaus professor Walter Peterhans. Stern took over Peterhans’s studio in 1929, and the following year Stern and Auerbach formed the studio foto ringl + pit. “Ringl” and “Pit” were their respective childhood nicknames.
“I frivoled and she was serious,” Auerbach recalled of their personalities in the partnership. ringl + pit specialised in advertising photography, and their photographs redefined the image of women in advertising. Their work came to define the “new women” that emerged in the 1910s and 20s, as women gained the right to vote and entered the work force in increasing numbers. Their partnership ended when they both emigrated in 1933.
Márta Aczél (Hungarian, 1909-1997) Cím nélkül (Tál) (Untitled (Bowl)) 1935 Gelatin silver print Image: 23.3 x 17.2cm (9 3/16 x 6 3/4 in.) Sheet: 23.8 x 17.5cm (9 3/8 x 6 7/8 in.) Frame: 45.72 x 35.56cm (18 x 14 in.) Frame (outer): 48.26 x 38.1 cm (19 x 15 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Born in Budapest in 1909. Educated in a private school Receives a degree in history of arts and German literature at the University of Frankfurt. Returns to Hungary in 1935. Jzsef Pcsi invites her to his private school. Although she did photography prior to that time, Pcsi’s school is a turning point in her life. Not only does the famous photographer teach her the technique but also influences her intellectually. At that time a substantial part of her advertising work and object photographs are made; she also she starts to exhibit her photographs. In 1936 she meets her future husband, György Kreilisheim. Magazines publish articles about their travels illustrated with her photos. After an apprenticeship exam Márta Aczél works for two years as an assistant to Elemérn Marsovszky (Fot Ada). She passes her master exam at Angelo’s. In 1950 starts working for Iparterv, and subsequently deals with industrial photography. At that time she travels widely across the whole country.
Anonymous text from the Luminous-Lint website [Online] Cited 25/11/2021
Margaret Watkins (1884-1969) was a Canadian photographer who is remembered for her innovative contributions to advertising photography. She lived a life of rebellion, rejection of tradition, and individual heroism; she never married, she was a successful career woman in a time when women stayed at home, and she exhibited eroticism and feminism in her art and writing.
Career
Watkins opened a studio in Greenwich Village, New York City, and in 1920 became editor of the annual publication Pictorial Photography in America. She worked successfully as an advertising photographer for Macy’s and the J. Walter Thompson Company and Fairfax, becoming one of the first women photographers to contribute to advertising agencies. She also produced landscapes, portraits, nudes and still lifes. While teaching at the Clarence White school from 1916 to 1928, her students included Margaret Bourke-White, Laura Gilpin, Paul Outerbridge, Ralph Steiner and Doris Ulmann.
One of the earliest art photographers in advertising, her images of everyday objects set new standards of acceptability. From 1928, when she was based in Glasgow, she embarked on street photography in Russia, Germany and France, specialising in store fronts and displays.
Watkins died in Glasgow, Scotland in 1969, largely forgotten as a photographer.
Legacy
Watkins legacy exists in her exemplary work left behind, but also her example as an independent, successful woman. The Queen’s Quarterly suggests her life is an inspiration for single women, who are fulfilled by their careers, rather than the traditional gender roles women face of fulfilment through marrying and having children.
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Ohne Titel (Anthurium) (Untitled (Anthurium)) 1927 Gelatin silver print Image: 37.7 x 48.6cm (14 13/16 x 19 1/8 in.) Frame: 55.88 x 66.04cm (22 x 26 in.) Frame (outer): 60.33 x 70.49cm (23 3/4 x 27 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
Aenne Biermann (March 8, 1898 – January 14, 1933), born Anna Sibilla Sternfeld, was a German photographer of Ashkenazi origin. She was one of the major proponents of New Objectivity, a significant art movement that developed in Germany in the 1920s.
Career
Biermann was a self-taught photographer. Her first subjects were her two children, Helga and Gershon. The majority of Biermann’s photographs were shot between 1925 and 1933. Gradually she became one of the major proponents of New Objectivity, an important art movement in the Weimar Republic. Her work became internationally known in the late 1920s, when it was part of every major exhibition of German photography.
Major exhibitions of her work include the Munich Kunstkabinett, the Deutscher Werkbund and the exhibition of Folkwang Museum in 1929. Other important exhibitions include the exhibition entitled Das Lichtbild held in Munich in 1930 and the 1931 exhibition at the Palace of Fine Arts (French: Palais des Beaux Arts) in Brussels. Since 1992 the Museum of Gera has held an annual contest for the Aenne Biermann Prize for Contemporary German Photography, which is one of the most important events of its kind in Germany.
Louise Dahl-Wolfe (November 19, 1895 – December 11, 1989) was an American photographer. She is known primarily for her work for Harper’s Bazaar, in association with fashion editor Diana Vreeland. …
Style
Among the celebrated fashion photographers of the 20th century, Louise Dahl-Wolfe was an innovator and influencer who significantly contributed to the fashion world. She was most widely known for her work with Harper’s Bazaar. Dahl-Wolfe was considered a pioneer of the ‘female gaze’ in the fashion industry. Dahl-Wolfe created the new image of American women during the World War II. They were strong and independent. Dahl-Wolfe often shot on location and outdoors, bringing her models out of the studio and to exotic locales such as Tunisia, Cuba and South America. Her models pose candidly, almost as if Dahl-Wolfe had just walked in on them. Dahl-Wolf innovatively used colour in photography and mainly concerned with the qualities of natural lighting, composition, and balance. Her methodology in using natural sunlight and shooting outdoors became the industry standard even now. …
“She is the most important woman, fashion photographer of the first half of the 20th century,” according to photographic expert Terrence Pepper and for Valerie Steele, the vitality and dynamism in Dahl-Wolfe’s work “were a big part of the rise of the American look.”
Genevieve Naylor (American, 1915-1989) Models wearing suits by Carolyn Schnurer 1945-1946 Gelatin silver print Image: 27.4 x 25.2cm (10 13/16 x 9 15/16 in.) Mount: 50.5 x 25.2cm (19 7/8 x 9 15/16 in.) Frame: 55.88 x 40.64cm (22 x 16 in.) Frame (outer): 58.42 x 43.18cm (23 x 17 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Peter Rezniko
Genevieve Naylor (American, 1915-1989)
Genevieve Naylor (February 2, 1915 – July 21, 1989) was an American photographer and photojournalist, best known for her photographs of Brazil and as Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal photographer.
Career
At the age of 22, in 1937, Naylor was chosen by Holger Cahill of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as a photographer for the Harlem Arts Center. She also worked for the WPA in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., and New York. She then worked for the Associated press and was one of the first women photojournalists to be hired by any American news wire services.
In 1940, Genevieve Naylor was assigned by the U.S. State department as part of a team to travel to Brazil. In an effort to further and strengthen the anti-Nazi relationship between the United States and Brazil and to promote mutual cultural awareness, the U.S. Office of Inter-American Affairs, under the leadership of Nelson Rockefeller, created a team of notable Americans that included Orson Welles, Errol Flynn, and Walt Disney. Genevieve Naylor and her partner (and later husband) Misha Reznikoff arrived in Brazil in October, 1940, where he showed his paintings while Miss Naylor took photographs. Naylor’s assignment was to document Brazil’s progress toward becoming a modern nation, capture images that would boost war-time morale, foster cultural interchange, and promote the Allied cause. But Naylor, with her energetic and outgoing personality, soon ventured into other milieus, taking photographs of Brazilian workers jammed into trams, school children, religious and street festivals, and various aspects of everyday lives. Because it was war time, film was rationed, and Naylor’s equipment was modest. She had neither flash nor studio lights and had to carefully choose her shots, balancing spontaneity with careful composition. Of her work, nearly 1,350 photos survived and were preserved. After her return to the states in 1943, Naylor become only the second woman photographer to be given a one-woman show when her work was exhibited by New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Naylor later spent 15 years as a photographer with Harper’s Bazaar and from 1944 to 1980 was a freelance photographer for Vogue, McCall’s, Town and Country, Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, Women’s Home Companion, Cosmopolitan, Fortune, Collier’s, Glamour, Good Housekeeping, Vanity Fair, Elle, Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, House Beautiful, Holiday, Mademoiselle, American Home, Seventeen, Better Homes and Gardens, Charm, Bride’s, amongst others. She was a war time photographer, covering parts of the Korean War for Look magazine.
Naylor’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions in the United States, the UK, and Europe. The most recent, The New Women Behind the Camera 2021-2022, opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the summer of 2021, and will continue into 2022 at The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Her historic alliance with Brazil continues in 2022 with the SESC 24 de Maio, Sao Paulo, exhibition, Raio-Que-O-Parta: Modern Fictions in Brazil.
Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003) Teacup Ballet 1935 Gelatin silver print Image: 40.64 x 30.48cm (16 x 12 in.) Frame (outer): 53.34 x 45.72 x 4.45cm (21 x 18 x 1 3/4 in.) The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003)
Olive Cotton (11 July 1911 – 27 September 2003) was a pioneering Australian modernist female photographer of the 1930s and 1940s working in Sydney. Cotton became a national “name” with a retrospective and touring exhibition 50 years later in 1985. A book of her life and work, published by the National Library of Australia, came out in 1995. Cotton captured her childhood friend Max Dupain from the sidelines at photoshoots, e.g. “Fashion shot, Cronulla Sandhills, circa 1937” and made several portraits of him. Dupain was Cotton’s first husband. …
Style
During the 1930s Cotton developed mastery using the ‘Pictorial’ style of photography popular at the time and also incorporated a very modern style approach. Cotton’s photography was personal in feeling with an appreciation of certain qualities of light in the surroundings. From mid-1934 until 1940 she worked as Max Dupain’s assistant in his largely commercial studio in Bond Street, Sydney, where she developed a very personal approach which concentrated on capturing the play of light on inanimate objects and in nature. She would often use her Rolleiflex camera to secure unposed reactions while Max set up the lighting for a portrait. Her style soon became distinguishable from that of other modernist photographers’ of her time.
Signature photographs
Tea cup ballet (1935) was photographed in the studio after Cotton had bought some inexpensive china from Woolworth’s to replace the old chipped studio crockery. In it she used a technique of back of the lighting to cast bold shadows towards the viewer to express a dance theme between the shapes of the tea cups, their saucers and their shadows. It was exhibited locally at the time and in the London Salon of Photography in 1935. It has become Cotton’s signature image and was acknowledged on a stamp commemorating 150 years of photography in Australia in 1991. Tea cup ballet features on the cover of the book Olive Cotton: Photographer published by the National Library of Australia in 1995.
Caroline Whiting Fellows (American, 1905-1989) Untitled (Vermouth and rye) 1930s Dye imbibition print Image: 21.6 x 17cm (8 1/2 x 6 11/16 in.) Mount: 27 x 22.2cm (10 5/8 x 8 3/4 in.) Frame: 45.72 x 35.56cm (18 x 14 in.) Frame (outer): 48.26 x 38.1cm (19 x 15 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Isabell VanMerlin
Trude Fleischmann (American born Austria, 1895-1990) Toni Birkmeyer-Ballett in “Cancan,” Wien (Toni Birkmeyer Ballet Company in “Cancan,” Vienna) c. 1930 Gelatin silver print Image: 19.05 x 17.46cm (7 1/2 x 6 7/8 in.) Mat: 45.72 x 35.56cm (18 x 14 in.) Frame: 45.72 x 35.56cm (18 x 14 in.) Frame (outer): 48.26 x 38.1cm (19 x 15 in.) Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Trude Fleischmann (American born Austria, 1895-1990)
Trude Fleischmann (22 December 1895 – 21 January 1990) was an Austrian-born American photographer. After becoming a notable society photographer in Vienna in the 1920s, she re-established her business in New York in 1940. …
Early life
Born in Vienna in December 1895, Fleischmann was the second of three children in a well-to-do Jewish family. After matriculating from high school, she spent a semester studying art history in Paris followed by three years of photography at the Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Photographie und Reproduktionsverfahren in Vienna. She then worked for a short period as an apprentice in Dora Kallmus’ fashionable Atelier d’Ora and for a longer period for photographer Hermann Schieberth. In 1919, she joined the Photographische Gesellschaft in Wien (Vienna Photographic Society).
Career
In 1920, at the age of 25, Fleischmann opened her own studio close to Vienna’s city hall. Her glass plates benefitted from her careful use of diffuse artificial light. Photographing music and theatre celebrities, her work was published in journals such as Die Bühne, Moderne Welt, ‘Welt und Mode and Uhu. She was represented by Schostal Photo Agency (Agentur Schostal). In addition to portraits of Karl Kraus and Adolf Loos, in 1925 she took a nude series of the dancer Claire Bauroff which the police confiscated when the images were displayed at a Berlin theatre, bringing her international fame. Fleischmann also did much to encourage other women to become professional photographers.
With the Anschluss in 1938, Fleischmann was forced to leave the country. She moved first to Paris, then to London and finally, together with her former student and companion Helen Post, in April 1939 to New York. In 1940, she opened a studio on West 56th Street next to Carnegie Hall which she ran with Frank Elmer who had also emigrated from Vienna. In addition to scenes of New York City, she photographed celebrities and notable immigrants including Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Oskar Kokoschka, Lotte Lehmann, Otto von Habsburg, Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi and Arturo Toscanini. She also worked as a fashion photographer, contributing to magazines such as Vogue. She established a close friendship with the photographer Lisette Model.
Wynn Richards (American, 1888-1960) Preparing Yarn for Weaving 1948 Collage of gelatin silver prints Sheet: 24 x 20.9cm (9 7/16 x 8 1/4 in.) Mount: 34.8 x 25.7cm (13 11/16 x 10 1/8 in.) Frame: 45.72 x 35.88cm (18 x 14 1/8 in.) Frame (outer): 48.26 x 38.74cm (19 x 15 1/8 in.) Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Richards trained as a Pictorialist in 1918 and 1919 at the Clarence White School of Photography in New York City, and then operated a portrait studio in her hometown of Greenville, Mississippi. After centuries of looking to Europe for cultural leadership, America was developing its own forms of creative expression and New York City was emerging as the centre of that movement. In 1922 Richards relocated there and soon found work at Vogue magazine.
After World War I, people showed little interest in the quality of illusion characteristic of the Pictorialist aesthetic. Sharp-focus and artificial lighting were replacing the soft-focus, available-light style she learned initially. With course work in advertising photography at the White School in 1924, Richards broke ground as one of the very first women in a newly emerging area of fashion photography. Richards not only successfully bridged the Pictorialist and Modernist movements but rose to the top of her field and remained there for more than 25 years. …
Richards’s established a career when few professional photography opportunities existed for women. She entered her profession just as formal education and institutional frameworks for fashion photographers began to operate in New York. Even so, she felt forced to choose between being a wife, mother, and social leader or a woman with a career. Richards made a lifelong commitment to photography – not just as a career, but as an art form.
Through her work with schools and professional organisations, Richards helped advance the concept of careers for women. Although she dropped from popular view in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Richards’ photographs are being rediscovered through exhibitions and the art photography market.
Beverly W. Brannan, Curator of Photography, Prints & Photographs Division. “Wynn Richards (1888-1960),” on the Library of Congress website 2013 updated 2015 [Online] Cited 26/11/2021
Frances McLaughlin-Gill (1919-2014) was an American photographer and the first female fashion photographer under contract with Vogue. After two decades in the fashion industry, she worked as an independent film producer for a decade making commercials and films. One of her films won the Gold Medal at the 1969 International Films and TV Festival of New York. In her later career, she published several collections both with her sister and in collaboration with other authors.
Frances McLaughlin-Gill (American, 1919-2014) Untitled (Toni Frissell photographing three models at a fashion shoot with her husband and daughter in the foreground) c. 1940 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 27.3 x 26cm (10 3/4 x 10 1/4 in.) Mat: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.) Frame: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.) Frame (outer): 53.34 x 43.18cm (21 x 17 in.) Toni Frissell Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Anna Riwkin (Swedish born Russia, 1908-1970) Nomads of the North 1950 Bound volume Open: 27.94 x 44.45cm (11 x 17 1/2 in.) Mount: 3.02 x 43.82 x 28.26cm (1 3/16 x 17 1/4 x 11 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Library, Gift of the Department of Photographs
Anna Riwkin (Swedish born Russia, 1908-1970)
Anna Riwkin-Brick or just Anna Riwkin (Surazh, Chernigov Governorate, Russia 23 June [O.S. 10 June] 1908 – Tel Aviv 19 December 1970) was a Russian-born Swedish photographer. …
Riwkin-Brick contributed significantly to the growing use of photographs in children’s picture-books, a genre that developed in the second half of the century.
In 1950, with the aim of promoting tolerance by introducing children from different countries to each other’s lives, and international understanding through children’s literature that would also be read by adults, Riwkin-Brick was commissioned by the UNESCO to make a photo book about the Sami people. She persuaded Elly Jannes, a journalist for the journal Vi, to write the text for Vandrande by (‘Wandering Village’, also released as ‘Nomads of the North’), published in 1950. Anna Riwkin-Brick took many photos of a Sami family’s little girl Elle Kari that were not included in the Vandrande by edition, and Elly Jannes suggested they make another photo book about Elle Kari and to aim it at a child audience which was published in 1951.
It was the first Swedish picturebook with photos of everyday life of a child in a continuous story, and the first of many such books that the photographer was to make. It was a success. Translated into eighteen languages in editions with high print runs; 25,000 copies were printed for the first edition released in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Annelise Kretschmer (1903-1987) was a German portrait photographer. Kretschmer is best known for her depictions of women in Germany in the early 20th century and is credited with helping construct the ‘Neue Frau’ or New Woman image of modern femininity.
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Vanderbilt Avenue from East 46th Street October 9, 1935 Gelatin silver print Overall: 23.7 x 16.5cm (9 5/16 x 6 1/2 in.) Frame: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.) Frame (outer): 53.34 x 43.18cm (21 x 17 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, The Marvin Breckinridge Patterson Fund and Robert B. Menschel Fund
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Janet Flanner 1927 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 22.6 x 17.2cm (8 7/8 x 6 3/4 in.) Mat: 45.72 x 35.56cm (18 x 14 in.) Frame: 45.72 x 35.56cm (18 x 14 in.) Frame (outer): 49.53 x 39.37cm (19 1/2 x 15 1/2 in.) Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Berenice Abbott / Masters Collection / Getty Images
Emmy Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953) Amsterdam tijdens de hongerwinter (Amsterdam during the hunger winter) [1944-1945] Published 1947 Bound volume Closed: 29.21 x 22.86cm (11 1/2 x 9 in.) Open: 29.21 x 44.45cm (11 1/2 x 17 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art Library, David K.E. Bruce Fund
Emmy Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953)
Emmy Eugenie Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953) was a Dutch photographer best known for her work with the Underground Camera group (De Ondergedoken Camera [nl]) during World War II. …
War years and the ‘Underground Camera’
In June 1941 Andriesse married graphic designer and visual artist Dick Elffers (a gentile with whom she had two sons, one who died young), but as a Jew during the Nazi occupation Andriesse was no longer able to publish and she was forced into hiding. At the end of 1944, with the assistance of the anthropologist Arie de Froe [nl] she forged an identity card and re-engaged in everyday life, joining a group of photographers, including Cas Oorthuys and Charles Breijer, working clandestinely as De Ondergedoken Camera. The photos that Andriesse made under very difficult conditions of famine in Amsterdam, include Boy with pan, The Gravedigger and Kattenburg Children are documents of hunger, poverty and misery during the occupation in the “winter of hunger” of 1944-1945.
Post-war
After the war, she became a fashion photographer and was an associate and mentor of Ed van der Elsken. She participated in the group show Photo ’48 and in 1952, together with Carel Blazer [nl], Eva Besnyö and Cas Oorthuys, the exhibition Photographie, both in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Edward Steichen chose her 1947 portrait of a staid and elderly Dutch couple for the section ‘we two form a multitude’ in the Museum of Modern Art world-touring The Family of Man that was seen by an audience of 9 million. More recently (October 2006 – January 2007) she was included in a display of Twentieth Century European photography at the Barbican Art Gallery, London.
Andriesse’s last commission, the book The World of Van Gogh – published posthumously in 1953 – was not yet complete when she became ill and after a long battle with cancer, died at the age of 39.
Emmy Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953) Amsterdam tijdens de hongerwinter (Amsterdam during the hunger winter) (detail) 1947 Bound volume Closed: 29.21 x 22.86cm (11 1/2 x 9 in.) Open: 29.21 x 44.45cm (11 1/2 x 17 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art Library, David K.E. Bruce Fund
Steeds grauwer werd het beeld de steden. Schoeisel en kleding raakten totaal versleten.
The image of the cities became increasingly grey. Footwear and clothing became totally worn out.
Emmy Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953) Amsterdam tijdens de hongerwinter (Amsterdam during the hunger winter) (detail) 1947 Bound volume Closed: 29.21 x 22.86cm (11 1/2 x 9 in.) Open: 29.21 x 44.45cm (11 1/2 x 17 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art Library, David K.E. Bruce Fund
De etalages waren leeg of toonden alleen vervangingsmiddelen.
The shop windows were empty or only showed substitutes.
National Gallery of Art National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets Constitution Avenue NW, Washington
![Leni Riefenstahl 'Schönheit im olympischen Kampf' [Beauty in the Olympic Games] Berlin: Im Deutschen Verlag, (1937)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/leni-riefenstahl-schonheit-im-olympischen-kampf.jpg "Leni Riefenstahl 'Schönheit im olympischen Kampf' [Beauty in the Olympic Games] Berlin: Im Deutschen Verlag, (1937)")
!['Leni Riefenstahl Schönheit im olympischen Kampf' [Beauty in the Olympic Games] Berlin: Im Deutschen Verlag, (1937) pp. 220-221](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/leni-riefenstahl-schonheit-im-olympischen-kampf-a.jpg "'Leni Riefenstahl Schönheit im olympischen Kampf' [Beauty in the Olympic Games] Berlin: Im Deutschen Verlag, (1937) pp. 220-221")
![Emmy Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953) 'Amsterdam tijdens de hongerwinter' (Amsterdam during the hunger winter) [1944-1945] book published 1947](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/5280-082-small.jpg "Emmy Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953) 'Amsterdam tijdens de hongerwinter' (Amsterdam during the hunger winter) [1944-1945] book published 1947")
![Emmy Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953) 'Amsterdam tijdens de hongerwinter' (Amsterdam during the hunger winter) [1944-1945] book published 1947 (detail)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/5280-082-detail1.jpg "Emmy Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953) 'Amsterdam tijdens de hongerwinter' (Amsterdam during the hunger winter) [1944-1945] book published 1947 (detail)")
![Emmy Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953) 'Amsterdam tijdens de hongerwinter' (Amsterdam during the hunger winter) [1944-1945] book published 1947 (detail)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/5280-082-detail2.jpg "Emmy Andriesse (Dutch, 1914-1953) 'Amsterdam tijdens de hongerwinter' (Amsterdam during the hunger winter) [1944-1945] book published 1947 (detail)")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
You must be logged in to post a comment.