1899 series silver certificate

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 "feminine" 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." Anne Noggle took up photography after careers as a Women's Air Force service pilot, stunt pilot and crop duster. Her work, exemplified by Untitled #3 (1975), a portrait of a woman with face-lift stitches surrounding her eyes, contemplates aging in women and the prevailing conventional wisdom that dictates that men look better as they age, while women need face-lifts to remain attractive. Joyce Neimanas also explores this issue in her computer-generated color inkjet print Face Lift (1993), from her series "Legends of the Powerless." Joan Myers, also displeased with the way older women are defined and portrayed, created Buttocks and June (both 1993) as her response. The resemblance of June to the subject of Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936), a 32-year-old pea picker who looks decades older than her age, is startling.

That women have been involved in photography from its earliest days is affirmed by the work of Genevieve-Elizabeth F. Disderi, whose interior of St. Matthew is from a 1856 album of albumen prints of neighborhood ruins, a favorite nineteenth-century subject. Disderi was a business partner with her ultimately more famous husband, Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi, popularizer of the carte de visite process. Despite the fact that she operated her own Paris studio from 1872 to 1878, her death certificate lists her as "sans profession." The third and the only "homely" one of seven daughters of a titled British official in India, Julia Margaret Cameron was 48-years-old when her son gave her a camera to keep her "occupied." She became obsessed with her new hobby, turning a chicken coop into a studio and a coal bin into a darkroom. "From the first moment," she wrote, "I handled my lens with a tender ardor ... I longed to arrest all beauty." Although Cameron's processing methods were ridiculed by the professional photographers of her day and today her extensive body of work is often dismissed as mannered and sentimental period pieces, her portraits are as perceptive as Nadar's. Along with Walker Evans, Lange documented the Depression years. She concentrated on problems specific to women with children and lived the difficult lifestyle reflected in her work - her children were raised by relatives while she pursued her profession. Her images, except for the haunting Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California included in the exhibition, rarely received the extensive critical attention of those of Evans.

The contributions of women to the art, profession and discipline of photography necessitates a survey of many artists. At issue is the role of the curator in selecting who and what to include or exclude. "Insight" was assembled by three interns - Rachel Stoeltje, Kellery Wildern and Leslie Brown - from the museum's certificate program under the aegis of chief curator Marianne Fulton; therefore, the responsibility for image selections is shared. Most of the "big" names were included: Berenice Abbott, Gertrude Kasebier and others mentioned here. The mixed media narrative imagery of Bea Nettles, the street photographs of Lisette Model and the unsettling portraits of the mentally handicapped by Model's famous student, Diane Arbus, were represented. Yet the exhibition was skewed in favor of contemporary rather than historical work by 33 out of 45 women represented who are living artists. This gave the selection a "freshness" it would have lacked had only old favorites been trotted out. It also reinforced a diversity of subject, style and process as the focus rather than a single-minded attempt to choose only the most well-known pieces by earlier photographers.