Women have been actively involved with photography ever since the medium was first introduced in 1839. They were drawn to it professionally and personally, finding it an effective means both to earn a living and to express ideas and feelings. An easily achieved skill adaptable to a wide variety of uses, photography offered women a more congenial discipline than the traditional visual arts of painting and sculpture. The barriers to their parti . There are several answers to this question and several more questions to ask.
Research suggests otherwise.
Because the selection of what shall be remembered has been done, throughout most of photographic history, by male scholars, women have tended to be dismissed or slighted. This process has obscured significant contributions by some once well known individuals, and it ignores entirely those who never made it into the spotlight. Women are never mentioned in connection with the prehistory of photography, although a Chinese woman scientist, Huang La, is said to have added a lens to the camera obscura in the early nineteenth century, and the German painter Friederike Wilhelmine von Wunsch announced a process for making portraits with light-sensitive materials in early 1839. And images created by women or jointly by spousal teams are sometimes transformed by history into the work of a male only, as happened in the case of Rogi Andre, Harriet and Robert Christopher Tytler, and Carolyn and Edwin Gledhill. Women have consistently been scanted in the general histories of the medium.