work: a review looking at how women...

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27 Dec 2019

End of PageLooking at How Women (Photographers)Work: A Review

Suryanandini Narain

“Women are all born with a special, independent organ that allows them to lie. Thiswas Dr. Tokai's personal opinion. It depends on the person, he said, about the kind oflies they tell, what situation they tell them in, and how the lies are told. But at a certainpoint in their lives, all women tell lies, and they lie about important things.”

- ‘An Independent Organ’ in Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami (2017:75)

The title of a recent conference at the Tate Modern, London (30th November - 2ndDecember, 2019), organised by Fast Forward, is posed as a seemingly direct question‘How Do Women Work?’ The answers however, are multiple, complicated and varied,allowing no generalisations, data or statistics, to be established. Women’s work, sooften invisible, unpaid and unacknowledged does not easily speak of itself, let alone itsmethods which remain contingent, un institutionalised and equally invisible. It takeswomen to consciously halt, organise and reflect on themselves as they ruminate on thedetails of their own labour. Feminist academics have made keen note that there hasbeen a grave absence of famous women writers, artists, and academics from a maledominated global historical narrative. Linda Nochlin primarily investigated why therehave been no great women artists in her famous essay (1971), and pinned it to thelack of social access and education. A film called ‘The Wife’ (2017) directed by BjornL. Runge with Glenn Close in the lead as the ghost writer for her Nobel Laureatehusband is an example of how gendered literary history is. It does, however, challengeNochlin’s perception by stating that women have always produced work, and it issociety that has failed to acknowledge them publicly. The absence of sociallyacclaimed ‘greatness’ or ‘fame’, did not mean the lack of women artists themselves. Anongoing exhibition titled The Pre Raphaelite Sisters at the National Portrait Gallery inLondon positions women artists of 1850s - 1900s as being representative of the talent,education and production of art, similarly questioning historicisation more than the lackof production itself.

Apart from the visible outcomes of women's work for which they may be credited ornot, the fact is that they do work, have always worked, and will continue to do so. Thecontexts and methods of their work, and the question of gendered methods ofproduction, open new territories yet to be explored. In the field of photography, theconference was an initiative by Fast Forward to excavate answers to these questions.

The figure of the woman photographer as artist, journalist or archivist among otherswas the subject of this conference, spoken of and by themselves to an audience thatwas largely female. One wonders whether such a discursive space finally remainslimited to its feminine echo chamber, as men seem to remain uninterested on thesubject, and women have only themselves to reference. Or perhaps the very fact thatan important art institution such as the Tate Modern has put the work of womenphotographers and their methods of production on its timeline, is a redeeming point initself. Museums, their inclusions and exclusions was in fact the theme of the first sessionof the conference, highlighting contributions of figures such as Grace Morley, first

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Director of the San Francisco Museum of Art in the 1930s in changing the curatorialorientation of a male dominated establishment to include photography. Tate’s parallelcurrent exhibition of the works of photographer and artist Dora Maar affirms theinstitution’s sensibility in recognising the work of women, as they step out of paintingsthat they were muses for, and pick up the brush (or the camera), themselves. Maar,famous as Picasso’s muse, met him at the peak of her career in 1935-36. She taughthim the cliche-verde technique of combining photography and printmaking, which heengaged with till the end of his career. She photographically documented theprogression of his painting Guernica (1937), bringing her political awareness to hisconsciousness. Perhaps her presence and the camera itself had the impact of makingthe masterpiece almost photographic in nature, something that did not escape Maar’snotice. In fact, Maar stated that Picasso borrowed motifs such as the electric lamp inthis painting, from her own work made earlier that year. Well known for her surrealistphotographs and cubist paintings, Maar’s methods influenced the outcomes of one ofhistory’s greatest male artists, and this fact itself makes the question on ‘how womenwork’ a crucial one.

Fast Forward describes itself as a research project that commenced in 2014, based outof the University for the Creative Arts, UK. The organisers state on their website that“there are millions of women in the world of photography and now is the time to arrestthe process of forgetting that so frequently erases women from the burgeoning historiesof photography and shed light on new ways of thinking, showing, discussing anddistributing our work” (). More obviously, women’s work in the domestic domain andthe informal sector is highly complex as it resists categorization, quantification andrecognition. It remains non-monetized, often in the form of assistantship for their malecounterparts and their professional pursuits. The fact of invisibility extends toprofessional realms globally, as was the fate of the Croatian women photographersbetween the 1940s to the 70s, (speaker: Sandra Krizic Roban), Nina Leen’s (c. 1909 -1995) unacknowledged contributions to 374 issues of the Life Magazine (speaker: ErinLevitsky) and the exclusion of Berenice Abbott and Rosemary Gilliat’s documentation ofthe North American Highway even as Robert Frank produced his famous photo bookThe Americans in the same decade of the 1950s (speaker: Charlene Heath). ‘How’they must go about doing this work is in the absence of formal training, structure,consistency, support or recognition. Pulling away from the controversial question ofwether women’s photography itself was different from that of men in discernible ways,the focus of the papers and discussions was on how differential conditions informedwomen photographers, and when their method itself became the photographic subjectdue to issues of access and affect. Thus Carie Mae Weem’s Family Pictures and Storiesis an unparalleled feminine insight into black lives which informed the publication ofRepresentations of Black Motherhood and Photography (co edited by Deschler, Canossiand Lopez by Women Picturing Revolution). Similarly, the body itself became themethod for photographic performances for Rosy Martin and Haley Morris-Cafiero inquestioning stereotypes.

For all the invisible women in the history of photography there have been those, albeitmuch fewer, who were celebrated. There is the self styled poster girl Chen Man (b.1980) of China, who continues to break new ground with her experiments in fashionphotography and her own story as a successful entrepreneur (speaker Kaimei OlsonWang), her predecessor in a different time and place in the person of Karimeh Abbud(1893 - 1940), considered to be the first female Arab photographer working in BritishMandate Palestine; and the pioneers from the Nordic studio culture (presented by theNordic Collective) of the early twentieth century, who were confident proprietors andemployees of studios while also being politically active. There was also theanthropologist Claudia Andujar who in the wake of debates in the discipline in the1970s regarding the problems of exoticism in ethnographic inquiry photographed theYanomami indigenous culture of Brazil (speaker: Thyago Nogueira).

Presentations by Lesly Deschler Canossi and Zoraida Lopez-Diago of Women PicturingRevolution and Sandrine Collard, curator of the exhibition ‘The Way She Looks: AHistory of Female Gazes in African Portraiture’ continued on the path of challengingthe white male centric intention of art. They examined how photography by women ofcolour was changing the way we were looking at the world, even within microcosms ofthe family. Evidence of engaging the camera as method for challenging epic biasessuch race and gender lies in image based print media, such as the 1987 black women

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photographers’ journal Polareyes discovered by photography historian Taous R.Dahmani. Else, there are photographic records of the camera itself at play, such as thearchive of the lesbian separatists of the 1970s and 80s called the ‘Ovulars’ whooperated in Womyn’s Lands across America. The Ovulars photographed themselvesmid-way in the act of photographing/being photographed, bearing cameras andposing, creating a layered reflexivity of the image making moment. Sexualitychanneled itself to discourse on the body and ageing, dwelled on poignantly by RosyMartin who uses photography for artistic practice as well as for therapy. Theconference concluded with artists papers on topics of postmodern criticality (William JSimmons), masquerade (Maria Gourieva on the feminine in late Soviet PrivatePhotography) and communal politics (Chinar Shah) made possible through consciouslyarticulated performativity before the lens. Gauri Gill and Haley Morris-Cafierodifferently approached the subject of the marginalised female body, along lines ofcaste, ethnicity or the great rural urban divide of India for Gill and along theconventions of the idealised slim caucasian woman whom Haley offered to counterthrough her own body.

Haruki Murakami’s story titled ‘An Independent Organ’, referenced in the epigram tothis review describes a Dr. Tokai’s degeneration, literally as a love-sick man who hadbeen swindled and lied to by his lady. Tokai attributes the female sex with an(invisible?) organ which enables them to effortlessly and instinctively lie in differentways, in different situations and for different purposes. Given that photography’s ownhistory is replete with debates on truth and realism, may the camera be this organ,which while it remains invisible from the final image, is the creator of myths andmemories in the hands of women? Do women in their very method, use the cameradifferently from men, and are their photographic stories consequently different frommen in the same situation? Does the camera mutate into a different organ in the handsof women, transforming its own possibilities and producing different visual facts? Is thecamera an organ that can counter the phallocentric truths of the world, where men’sversions of reality becomes real, and those of women, remain obliterated? Over threedays of richly illustrated 29 talks, women photographers have emerged as beingresilient, voicing alternatives to mainstream thought through their vision when othermeans (such as words) have not worked. Photography has been their preferred mediumfor a diverse range of reasons, making gender an impossible common factor informingtheir method. Yet the fact of their womanhood brings together the facilitators,participants and attendees at Fast Forward, to examine these very diversities anddifferences. The conference celebrates how denials of access, funds and socialapproval did not deter women from photographing, and how female subjectivityplayed forth into maternal, lesbian, political or other affective narrativisations of theirwork. A question that the writer Rachel Cusk recently asked in her article titled ‘Can aWoman Who is an Artist Ever Just be an Artist?’ (The New York times Magazine,November 7th, 2019), has been elaborated by her thus:

“Can a woman artist - however virtuosic and talented, however disciplined - ever attaina fundamental freedom from the fact of her own womanhood? Must the politics offemininity invariably be accounted for, whether by determinedly ignoring them or bydeliberately confronting them? The latter is a fateful choice that can shape an artist’slife and work; but does the former - the avoidance of oneself as a female subject -inevitably compromise the expressive act?”

The answer from the woman bearing the camera is perhaps that there are indeedaccesses, stories and realities that her lens can penetrate, by virtue of her gender, tothe degree that she wishes to use that identity. How ‘feminine’ does the woman artistwish to be? The selectivity of history must be challenged by these visual evidenceswhich women have produced by and through the contingent conditions of their work,perhaps producing what men simply cannot and have not. But wether by way ofavoidance or in embracing one’s feminine persona, the fact of image production iswhat remains as the contested and the celebrated site, and this, on a case by casebasis, history can not afford to ignore any more.

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