English readers looking to deepen their knowledge of photo history will be delighted. A global history of women photographers, freshly translated from French by Ruth Taylor and Bethany Wright and republished by Thames & Hudson, is a new encyclopedia of the forgotten. The volume, which chronologically traces the work of 300 women photographers from the beginnings of the medium to the present day, attempts a global perspective on the history of photography. Editors Luce Lebart and Marie Robert employed 164 women writers from international backgrounds to help create the book, expanding the scope of the work far beyond the biggest names in photography – and, perhaps most importantly, giving each artist equal real estate in terms of amount of images and number of words.
Sponsored by the Rencontres d’Arles and Kering as part of their larger women on the move project, the volume both amplifies these forgotten visions and paints a decisive picture of the “historiographic void” that has allowed women’s labor to be omitted and wrongly attributed throughout history. As the breadth and depth of the book demonstrates, “these women were everywhere and recorded everything,” pioneers of some of the most central movements in photography. Why then are so few women mentioned in encyclopedic works such as the 400-page “definitive” by Raymond Lécuyer? history of photography (1945), and not a single woman in Michel Frizot’s “comprehensive” New history of photography (1994)? While the answers provided by Lebart and Robert come as no surprise to any student of art history, their systematic approach serves as a necessary foundation for their efforts to “write another the story, and write it down differently.”
In its early stages, the vast and formidable project to write this story will inevitably raise more questions than it answers. For example, the volume – perhaps due to size and scope constraints – contains major omissions as far as contemporary photographers are concerned. To name a few, where is Deana Lawson? Catherine Opie? An-My Le? But if A global story‘s main purpose lies in correcting the past, such shortcomings can be forgiven; “history”, in this sense, is still under construction.
Working from a broader perspective, the volume’s research also seems to suggest that in the 1800s the first women who had access to photography in non-Western countries were white European colonizers of those lands. Elisabeth Pulman (1836–1900), perhaps New Zealand’s first female photographer, took notable portraits of indigenous Māori leaders; Marie-Lydie Bonfils (1837–1918) co-founded one of West Asia’s largest commercial photography studios, marketing images that projected a sense of the exotic; Geraldine Moodie (1854-1945) photographed First Nations people as she traveled alongside her husband, an officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In order to “ensure that the history of photography also becomes the history of all”, as champions of the book, it is crucial that we examine the ways in which members of underrepresented groups can (even unwittingly) participate in and benefit from other forms of oppression. systems like colonialism. This is not to say that these women should be brought out of obscurity only to be undone – on the contrary, their work merits closer study. because of the complex interplay of power and colonial hierarchy that such images demonstrate.
Indeed, the book manages to unearth a canon of previously unseen imagery from the past two centuries, giving us everything from lush pictorialism to stark abstraction. The work of the Palestinian photographer Karimeh Abbud (1893-1940) remained almost entirely unknown until a large portfolio of his work was rediscovered in the early 2000s, yet it is a striking departure from the style of the time; instead of using European-inspired backdrops in his portraits, Abbud photographed his subjects in their own homes or painted elements directly onto his prints and negatives. In her haunting ‘Portrait of a Woman’ (undated), she paints the very tree that seems to stabilize her subject, complicating questions of ‘reality’ and inviting symbolic interpretation. The German-Algerian photographer Zaïda Ben-YusufThe (1869-1933) photograph “Untitled (Invitation to a Vernissage of Photographs)” (1899) has a similar tone. A must-have on the New York socialite scene of the time, Ben-Yusuf wrote the text of his invitation alongside the figure of a mysterious, solitary young woman who turned her gaze away from us; the woman stands to the right of the text as if to give it space, while both are framed by an ornately decorated curtain. In both works, the artist’s intervention is indistinguishable from “real life”, because the elements produced by the camera interact with those drawn by hand, as if they inhabited the same universe.
And while the photographer Laure Albin Guillot (1879-1962) was recognized during her lifetime, “paradoxically, very little research has been conductedabout his career and work in recent years. Guillot’s work shows a remarkable range, as she simultaneously embraced a pictorialist classicism while pioneering a form of macro photography which she coined “micrography”. Decorative micrographplate IX (1931) wife Man Ray’s Cameraless “Rayographs” with the Surreal scientific documentation by filmmaker Jean Painlevé, demonstrating Guillot’s rightful place alongside the most eminent figures of French photography. Stories like these abound A global history of women photographers, and a review of this length can only touch the tip of the iceberg; hopefully this volume will invite new waves of scholarship to continue the work of these women in the future.
A global history of women photographers by Luce Lebart and Marie Robert is published by Thames & Hudson and is available in bookstores and online.
