A History of Women Photographers. - book reviews

I must confess my frequent perplexity over the condition of one specific area of activity - research devoted to women in photography - within what remains a small but rapidly growing field, the historianship of photography. For instance, in recent years I have watched with a mixture of bemusement and incomprehension the inflation of the Staten Island hobbyist Alice Austen into a pioneering documentarian and the dabbler Marjorie Content into a major artist, and the conversion of a not-untypical accumulation of student work into an ideological cottage industry.(1)

Had no one anything better to do, such squandering of energy might be excusable. But, during the same period in which those three posthumous reputations were industriously concocted, dozens of notable senior figures - Ruth Orkin, a Photo League member whose work on the film The Little Fugitive is credited with inspiring the French nouvelle vague; the Hungarian immigrant "social research photographer" Marion Palfi, whose photographs of civil-rights activities in the South served as early evidence for protective legislation; the photographer/curator/critic Margery Mann, to name just a few - were receiving scant serious attention in their declining years from scholars and biographers. The absence of Jill Freedman's work from most discussions and exhibitions of post-1960 documentary remains nothing short of scandalous. We still lack a collection of Elizabeth McCausland's perceptive essays on photography. And so on.

Wherever the blame may lie - I think there's enough to go around, and do not mean to shrug off my own share of it - there's no denying that an unsystematic mix of trends and exigencies has left us with a literature on this subject describable as spotty at best. Not that it isn't an improvement over what we had before. Due perhaps to their own inclinations, perhaps to the influence of their wives as active partners in their research and writing, Beaumont Newhall and Helmut Gernsheim, who authored one-volume synoptic histories of the medium that served as the standard references in the field through the early 1980s, may not come across as absolutely single-gendered as does H. W. Janson - women photographers appear in even the early editions of both, many not only spotlighted but unequivocally elevated to the pantheon. But these tomes certainly read nowadays primarily as histories of men in photography.

Hence there's a definite charm, and a real charge, to reading a well-written, quasi-Newhallian synoptic "history of women photographers"; one gets to follow a by-now familiar story - the standard account of the medium's chronological, technological, and morphological evolution - populated and enacted by an almost entirely new cast of characters of another gender. The effect is, to say the least, intriguing.

Does that mean it fills some crucial lacuna? I'm not sure that it does, even if the labor involved in Naomi Rosenblum's attempt to span that gap demands respect - indeed, even if it describes itself, with the same admirable modesty as her preceding "world history of photography," as a history rather than the history of its subject. That there might exist a market for such a study, even a demand for it, does not make it necessary (though it may have made it inevitable). And while Rosenblum has done a dependably competent and creditable job in researching and writing A History of Women Photographers, I'm not convinced that the project made the optimum use of her considerable investigative and analytical skills.

By coincidence, I was present at what I believe was the public birth of this endeavor: a lecture that Rosenblum delivered during the course of a panel in which we both participated, "Creating the Canon: Writing History," in October 1987, at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, Canada, as part of the "Talking Pictures" conference sponsored by Toronto Image Works Ltd., Photo-Communique magazine (now defunct), and the Holocene Foundation.

Her subject was, as I recall, the presence of women in photography - as artists, as professional photographers, and as workers in the various branches of the photography industry - during the final decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. Rosenblum mustered convincing evidence that women were present and visible in all aspects of the medium at that juncture. This was true spadework, substantial original research based on primary source material, resulting from her digging into obscure archives and periodicals, scouring newspaper advertisements and census reports - in short, a genuine contribution to the dialogue around this subject, a contribution of both data and information (if we understand information to constitute that which informs, or gives form to, raw data).

Though the synoptic history clearly draws her (witness her two most recent books), I'm convinced that Rosenblum's forte, the area in which she has the most to give, is that brand of deep, fundamental research. Much such effort surely went into her current book; yet, curiously, very little of it is retrievable therefrom.