Out of that seminar will come an exhibition in the Art Museum scheduled for fall 2001, which will coincide with a conference on contemporary women artists in all media. Photography is a different medium than painting, with a different history and different institutional constraints. Women have played a larger role in the history of photography than in that of painting. But these institutions didn't exist for photographers. The early photographers, male and female, were upperclass amateurs.
Women photographers have always been part of the photographic canon, Armstrong says.
She cites Julia Cameron, an Englishwoman who was active for a decade in the mid-1860s. Linked to the pre-Raphaelite movement, Cameron knew and photographed many of the great men of her day, including Darwin and Tennyson. She created an album of photographs illustrating Tennyson's Idylls of the King , posing her maids and her nieces in medieval garb. Gender comes into at least two of the chapters, which are concerned with albums of photographs by women. She plans to explore the ways Manet depicted women, especially his favorite model, Victorine Meurent, who for a while was a painter herself.