Women Pioneers in Photography

Tonya Van Parys

History of Photography

28 May 2021

Introduction

Art history has a long-standing reputation for lack of inclusion towards women; this can be especially true when discussing the rather young medium of photography. Men such as William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) and Louis Daguerre (1787-1851) receive consistent praise in the pages of our photography and history books for creating the first “permanent photographic image” unfortunately, this miss leads the audience into crowning them as the founders of photography (Sandler 3). Although these men do deserve credit for their advancements, women had already begun to pave the way toward photography’s future long before Talbot and Daguerre landed on history pages.

“Residents of Oxford {England} were having their likeness taken by a woman way back in the 1700s” (Teanby 11:18). Sarah Harrington, a successful silhouette portrait artist, even patented a device in 1775 “for cutting a reduced copy of a likeness” this device is what created a black silhouette portrait on of her subjects on a white fabric “and a woman taking out a patent was a very rare thing” in the 18th century (Teanby 11:39). Harrington's silhouette cutting device would become part of “a category of patent registrations which later evolved into photography” (Teanby 11:47).

Trailblazing chemist Elizabeth Fulhame published a scientific paper in 1794, An Essay on Combustion, With a View to a New art of Dying and Painting. Although Fulhame was a chemist and not a photographer, her publication documented one of the most important and significant elements of photography, the chemical reaction of “silver nitrate coated on a piece of silk that was exposed to light and became a dark color” (Teanby13:45). The interaction of chemicals and light in Fulhame’s work is the “basis of the chemistry behind photography” (Teanby 13:52).

Harrington and Fulhame receive little credit for setting the first bricks of photography’s foundation; however, without these early publications by trailblazing women, would Talbot and Daguerre have been inspired to create a more permanent solution to preserve an image?

Women And Photography In the 19th Century

In the early 19th century and into the 20th century, voting was still reserved for men; in actuality, so was owning property, a last name, bank account, and opportunity for a career. Women had little value in society outside of being mothers and wives; they were often denied a completed education and, in many countries, the ability to enter into any type of contract while married unless “the woman was widowed or a spinster” and came from wealth and privilege (Teanby 32:50). This would prove a major hurdle as the patented daguerreotype photography process of silver plate positives required a contract to accesses its process. With women having minimal access to money, resources and burdened by predetermined roles within society, “All the conditions of her life, her own instincts, were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain” (Wolf 51). With limitations on creative freedom, it comes as no surprise that there was a shortage of women pioneers when discussing the birth and evolution of photography in the 19th century.

However, glass ceilings are meant to be broken, and this becomes even easier when the bricks being thrown have the added weight of privilege behind them. Anna Atkins, daughter of John George Children, a scientist, and member of the Royal Society, was often exposed to works by Talbot and, more importantly, the cyanotype process invented by John William Herschel in 1942. Atkins had become an exceptional botanist and had a natural ability in art with encouragement from her father and exposer to the Royal Society. Shortly after the invention of the cyanotype, a cyan-blue print made by light exposed to iron salts, Atkins became the “first to use photographs to illustrate a book” (Teanby 11:29). This self-published book was a remarkable representation of seaweeds and algae made as a direct complement to a book by William Henry Harvey, The British Algae. Anne Atkins’s work with botany and the cyanotype photo process would influence such scientists as Charles Darwin, accredited for attributing to the science of evolution.

Accomplished landscape painter and spinster Jane Wiggley purchased her own 10-year license to use the daguerreotype process for commercial work in London in 1845 while owning two photographic studios. Wiggley added hand-painted color to her images, “a reversing prism to correct the mirror image effect” and had begun to use the wet plate collodion method, invented by Frederick Scott Archer, making her images stand out among the male-dominated industry (Teanby 36:34). William Fox Talbot took this new technology as an infringement on his paper negative process and attempted to take “legal action” against Miss Jane Wiggley; however, “with all a woman's obstinacy, she took it on” and Talbot conceded (Teanby 37:43).

With women like Atkins and Wiggley adding to the development of photographic history, it would be tough to ignore the possibilities that many other pioneering women were left undiscovered due to the lack of inclusion by their male counterparts.

The 20th Century and Progress

While women were breaking glass ceilings in the male-dominated world of photography in the 19th century, a union of women fighting against gender discrimination began to form in the 20th. This union, known as the Suffragette Movement, founded by Emmeline Pankhurst, would lead women to advocate for equality, not just in art but also in daily life. These advancements in the Suffragette Movement, combined with the technological advancements made to the photographic process, would aid women to pioneer the male-dominated world of photography. Conversely, women would still have a long way to go before reaching the appreciation and notoriety they deserve for their impactful works in the art form.

“One of the greatest misconceptions perpetuated by the various history books of photography has been the notion that early women photographers did not play a major role in landscape photography” (Sandler 115). In fact, most books on the subjects assume “that because of the arduous nature of landscape photography,” women would find it too difficult of a challenge and would be more focused on domesticated life (Sandler ix). The danger behind this narrow manner of thinking that women can carry a human child, but not a camera across the landscapes of America, has left women out of the pages of history and often forgotten about entirely.

Before the famous and perhaps most noted male landscape photographer in history, Ansel Adams (1902-1984), the world was previously exposed to pioneering women such as Evelyn Cameron and Frances Benjamin Johnston.

Cameron left the comforts of her family’s London estate in 1868 to live in the “Badlands of America’s eastern Montana” where she would own three ranches with her older husband (Sandler 5). Cameron, struggling to make money after her husband’s death, picked up the camera in 1894 and had an extremely successful career selling her landscape photographs and documenting life on the ranch until her passing in 1928.

Johnston received great praise and notoriety for her earlier documentary work in the late 1800s with coal mines before she began to document America’s largely uninhabited landscapes. Ansel Adams become famous for his works in the 1940s of his images of Yellow Stone National Park; however, it was “in 1903 when Johnston photographed there, the only access was by horseback or stagecoach, and bears outnumbered the tourists” (Sandler 120). Coincidentally, several of Ansel’s images look like they were mimicking Johnston’s earlier work of Yellowstone.

With these two women clearly impacting landscape photography and paving the way for men such as Ansel Adams, one has to wonder how these two trailblazing women have been consistently skipped over in discussions of photography’s history and the discovery of our most precious national parks.

20th Century Documentary

While Johnston and Cameron were documenting landscapes in the wild west, others such as Laura Gilpin and Dorthya Lange would later turn their lens to the people of America and dramatically change the human portrait. Formerly, temperamental technologies and a prolonged shutter speed kept its subjects looking rather grim in their Sunday best during the victorian era. With the new and improved technologies of the 20th century, the photographer could capture their subject in a manner more fitting to how that particular person truly existed and lived in every daily life.

“While scores of early male photographers have been justifiably celebrated for their accomplishments in capturing the likeness and ways of life of early Native Americans, far too little recognition has been given to female photographers who focused on the same subject” (Sandler ix). Laura Gilpin is perhaps one of the most underrated female photographers; at 14, she was introduced to Gertrude Kasebier, a well-celebrated female among the pictorial photography movement. The meeting would profoundly affect Gilpin, who was encouraged by her newfound mentor to attend a surprisingly female-dominated arts program at Clarence White Scool before returning to Colorado to set up her own portrait and architectural photography studio. Eventually, her photography “took her outdoors and went beyond the terrain itself into the most ambitious and greatest of all endeavors” her 15-year long project with the Navajo people (Sandler 110). Without grants or funding for the project, the time she spent with the Navajo people “earning their trust and respect, was the result of some of the most sensitive of all depictions of the first Americans” (Sandler 110).

Dorothea Lange had also worked with the first Americans, but her documentary work on migrant workers and the great depression in the 1920s-1940s would bring her worldwide notoriety. Lange was hired along with 8 other women by Roy Stryker, head of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1935, to photograph the displaced farmers as part of a program to promote financial aid and governmental assistance. “For the next five years, she {Lange} would bring the compassion she had demonstrated in her depression work onto a national canvas” and become one of the most influential women in documentary photography (Sandler 77).

After profound documentary artists such as Gliplin And Lange, the world would go on to produce many more astounding women photographers in many fields, and even though the women’s equality movement helped women gain more independence, and a right to vote, history and society would still be a man’s world for decades to come.

Closing

In 2018 Jill Greenberg, a highly credited commercial photographer, addressed her personal experience with not only the lack of inclusion of female photographers in her field, more importantly, but she also highlighted an alarming concern that the majority of the world's images have mainly only been seen through a male’s perspective.“What happens when our views of the world are shaped by only a male lens, obviously then we are only getting the perspective and the biases of only half the population size almost every image has been filtered through a man’s eye and a man’s mind’ (Greenberg 6:10).

To be a female photographer is truly an act of courage, defiance, and a blatant protest against society’s expectations of a depleting notion that women have less value than their male counterparts. If we continue to explore these exceptional women photographers, past and present, perhaps we can draw enough attention to assure that the camera’s lens will only see equality going into the future.

Citations

Jill Greenberg. “The Female Lens | Jill Greenberg | TEDxWabashCollege.” YouTube, uploaded by Jill Greenberg, 2 July 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHuWVu7O2oM&feature=youtu.be.

Rose Teanby. “The first women of photography 1839–1860.” YouTube, uploaded by The Royal Photographic Society, 28 Oct. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxzXjBL6TJQ&feature=youtu.be.

Sandler, Martin. Against the Odds. New York, Rizzoli International, 2002.

Schirmer, Lothar, and Naomi Rosenblum. Women Seeing Women: From the Early Days of Photography to the Present. Illustrated, W. W. Norton & Company, 2003.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. First, Mariner Books, 1989

Photography

Elizabeth Fulhame’s Publication on silver nitrates