A Show of Her Own (1995)

At the George Eastman House, 56 photographs by 45 women comprised Insight: Women's Photographs from the Collection. Why mount an exhibition of photographs made only by women? A show limited to male photographers would be considered sexist. One answer to this comes from ongoing research and publications. Historians such as Naomi Rosenblum have documented the fact that women photographers have been consistently overlooked, under-studied, under-exhibited and under-collected, both in the past and currently. Often their achievements were credited to male spouses or colleagues. Thus the 75th anniversary of women's right to vote marks a time to make the previously invisible visible in Rochester, New York, hometown of Susan B. Anthony. Only now can it be determined if the work of women photographers equals that of their male counterparts in quality and creativity, or if certain subjects are more significant to them. First the numbers game: of the approximately 8000 photographs in the Eastman House collection, about 1000 or 12.5 % are by women. This compares to paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection, in which only five percent are by women. Women have fared comparatively well in photography, in part because it was easier for nineteenth-century women to acquire and master a camera than to enter a life drawing class. Yet although nearly as many women as men use cameras, and almost as many obtain advanced degrees in photography, women are consistently excluded from histories of the medium as art, in prices on the commercial market and in museum acquisitions and exhibitions. What was shown by this modest exhibition? (Rosenblum's History of Women Photographers [1994] examines the work of 240 women, five times the number featured at the Eastman House.) Certainly that diversity of subject and technique are universal, not gender specific. Subjects ranged from women's issues to portraits and self-portraits; from the industrial landscapes and abstractions of Margaret Bourke-White to the still-life abstractions of Florence Henri, to the light abstractions of Barbara Morgan. As for photographic processes, albumen, platinum and gelatin silver prints - some straight, some toned, some hand-colored and some manipulated - were represented. Also included were photogravures, cyanotypes, color prints on Plexiglas, Kwik prints, Cibachromes, Ektacolor prints, offset lithographs, photo silk-screen prints, dye-diffusion transfer and computer generated and digitized prints. Works that might be considered included Imogen Cunningham's 1929 Calla Lilies (although Edward Weston composed similar close-ups of organic shapes); Chris Enos's dead flowers (Untitled, 1980); Eva Watson-Schutze's Woman with Lily (1903); and Doris Ulmann's moving portraits of black women of Appalachia. Marie Cosindas's tiny Dolls I (1961) seems quintessentially feminine - although admittedly, my grandson plays with dolls and Cosindas's oeuvre contains a wide variety of subject matter. Olivia Parker's Saturday (1980) is a haunting composition featuring a corsage of dead flowers and a torn and battered love letter. Elaine O'Neil recorded the ups and downs of her relationship with her young daughter in Tiger Balm Gardens, Hong Kong (1987). In Untitled (1970-71), Betty Hahn enhanced her gum bichromate print on fabric of a barn and landscape with a stitched and embroidered rainbow. (Very few male photographers embroider.) Subjects that address feminist concerns included Donna Ferrato's depiction of the desperation of battered wives in First Night in Shelter (1987) in which a mother and baby are depicted sleeping peacefully at last. Self-portraits are so numerous that one considers two options: that women are more introspective or that they perhaps find it easier and less expensive to photograph themselves. Notable self-portraits include those by Joan Lyons (1974), Ilsa Bing (1899) and Alma R. Lavenson (1932). As a 13-year-old runaway, Nan Goldin moved from foster care to communes and took up photography while enrolled in an alternative school; the stark Nan and Brian on the Bed, NYC (1983) is from her series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. …