Women in Photo Biz

Girls with cameras? Crikey. Who'd have thought it?

I'm always a little bewildered by articles like this one. Anyone who looks at old photographic magazines (as I do, to my spiritual gain and financial loss) will find that right from the start women have always been fully active in photography.

I imagine that if you asked most people with an average knowledge of photographic history to name a British photographer of the 19th century, Julia Margaret Cameron would be first on the list. Asked to name another, there's a good chance it would be Clementina Hawarden, the archetypal "Mom With A Camera".

Hollywood fed us the image of the photographer as bare-chested Hemingway hero with a heart of gold or ambulance-chasing mean-street stalking Weegee. Some people still seem to relish those poses, but - at the very best - they were realities for a moment in photographic history. A moment which was also the era of Eve Arnold, Grace Robertson, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lang, Bunny Yeager, Ida Wyman etc. etc.....

MWAC and DWAC hatched at the same time :)

Cheers, Ian
 
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Bunny Yeager, (raaoow!!) there is a name that brings back memories of leafing thru the back pages of Modern Photography magazine & US Camera from the late 1950s.
there was a great documentary on TVO on the photographer Hansel Mieth
just recently.
 
Not to mention Cindy Sherman, Lee Miller, Leni Riefenstahl, Fay Godwin, Madame Yvonde etc etc. Just a few of my favourites...
 
"Objects in mirror may be closer..."

"Objects in mirror may be closer..."

It's the ubquity and "ease" of digital that cracks the landscape open wider to to those, male and female, who had an insufficient interest in photography to climb the technical learning curve (as if regarding a contemporary camera as merely a Pocket PC with a big zoom attached actually "flattens" said curve...I guess that's a story unto itself). This is, in fact, a cycle repeating itsself: When roll-film photography hit the scene over a century ago, a sizable part the general public went truly ga-ga for the medium. When exposure automation became reliable and more common, there was another growth spurt. When SLRs became cheaper, smaller, lighter and smarter, "everyone" had to get one...like the pros use, right?

The field of child photography has always been the entreé to paid work for many, many people, and most of the people in this case happen to be female. Hardly new; I've known several women who set up full-time businesses from what started as a hobby that conveniently paid for itself (hell, how did it happen for a lot of us?), and became at least reasonably successful. And, ironically, they're the ones whose heels are being bipped at by those who just bought a dSLR kit and, freshly-printed business cards in hand, are ready to conquer the neighborhood, if not the world. (Park Slope, Brooklyn, sometimes known as Stroller Central, is a very lucrative nabe for this, although most of the people I have as tech-support clients, and who happen to have kids – that is, most of them – are quite adept at taking their own pretty-good d-snaps, thank you).

Sometimes I think of the guy at the photo studio at Sears as the modern analogue (sorry...) of the Maytag repairman. He's gone digital, too, but it hardly seems to matter, since "everybody else has."


- Barrett
 
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