“The New Woman”: A Gutsy Photographer Who Broke Barriers
It was (and still is) hard for women photographers breaking into a boys’ club where tradition and misogyny ruled to prove they were (and are) just as good as, if not better than, their male counterparts.
“When they saw me in a sari with a camera hanging around, they thought it was a very strange sight,” said Homai Vyarawalla about her start as a photographer/photojournalist in India. “And in the beginning, they thought I was just fooling around with the camera, just showing off or something. And they didn’t take me seriously.”
As an amateur shutterbug, who also shot pictures for my stories as a foreign correspondent in a previous incarnation, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to see “The New Woman Behind the Camera” exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, honoring female trailblazers in the field.
Vyarawalla was one of India’s first women photojournalists who reported on the beginning of her country’s independence from the British Empire. She told an interviewer in 2004 that Rolleiflex was the camera of choice by press photographers worldwide because of its convenience and simplicity.
“We had to put our distance, take the picture. Just click,” she said.
She is one of 120 photographers from China, India, Japan, North and South America, the Soviet Union, Palestine and Europe featured in the exhibition that “explores the diverse ‘new women’ who embraced photography as a mode of professional and personal expression from the 1920s to the 1950s.”
So what prompted them to enter the world of photography?
The New Woman was a global symbol of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art by using the camera as a mean of independence, we’re told.
According to curators, The New Woman was a term coined in Great Britain in 1894. It broke down conventional ideas of gender, ruffled quite a few feathers, was a source of inspiration and embodied efforts around the world for equity and expanded rights.
For a number of women, the camera was a means to achieve personal and financial independence. Often featuring the photographer with her camera, compelling self-portraits helped to establish women as professionals and artists. Some explored their personal identities, presenting alternative models of femininity that challenged traditional gender roles. Many experimented with avant-garde techniques such as photomontage and multiple exposures. Pictures taken by colleagues offer rare behind-the-scenes glimpses into the working lives of these path-breaking photographers and help visualize the diversity of the new women behind the camera.
Ilse Bing (1899–1998), an American born in Germany, was dubbed “Queen of the Leica” and got her first 35mm camera in 1929.
As opposed to bulkier and heavier cameras set on tripods, the Leica was compact, lightweight and handheld, leading to the rise of street photography and reportage.
Magazine publisher Henry Luce tapped American Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971), noted for her pictures of skyscrapers and heavy industry, as the first staff photographer at Fortune magazine in 1929. She traveled the world and became famous for her photos in Life magazine.
Elsewhere, Italian Wanda Wulz (1903–1984) learned photography at her family’s Trieste portrait studio established by her grandfather where she experimented with the medium.
She created a composite by printing two negatives — one of her face and the other of the family cat — on a single sheet of photographic paper, evoking by technical means the seamless conflation of identities that occurs so effortlessly in the world of dreams, curators wrote.
Commercial studios across the globe helped women break into photography where they experimented, established professional careers and earned their own income.
Their subjects were a mix of middle class and aristocratic models, including artists, writers and celebrities. The photographers often traveled to clients’ homes, sometimes bringing their own backdrops, which provided more privacy.
Women had been involved in the production of studio portraits from the medium’s earliest days. They hand-colored and mounted prints, retouched negatives, and served as studio receptionists. By the 1920s, women were running their own businesses in greater numbers and quickly claimed their position behind the camera, reinvigorating the genre of portraiture.
Pioneer Karimeh Abbud (1896–1955) founded the first female-led photography studio in Palestine. She sometimes stamped her prints in English and Arabic with “Karimeh Abbud Lady Photographer” and often photographed subjects at their homes.
In addition to her portraits that challenged preconceived ideas of women from the Middle East, Abbud also courted foreign tourists with her photographic postcards of the region, its landscape and people.
On to the avant-garde, where women photographers were instrumental in experimenting with photomontage, multiple exposure, cameraless photograms, extreme close-ups, long exposure times, unconventional cropping, dizzying camera angles and sharp contrasts of light and shadow techniques.
Grete Stern (1904–1999), an Argentinian born in Germany, produced “Dream No 1: ‘Electric Appliances for the Home’,” in 1949 in which a woman was turned into a lamp base and about to be turned on by a man’s hand.
“This provocative scene conveys the erotically charged expressions of dreams while calling out unequal power dynamics induced by traditional gender roles,” reads the description.
French photojournalist Denise Bellon (1902–1999) shot Fouta Djallon in the then French West African colony of Guinea by composing “an elaborate scene of textures, patterns and shadows that emphasize the contour of the sitter’s face and fan-shaped hairstyle.”
Bellon captured the scene from above while Djallon “rests on a woven mat as a disembodied set of fingers reaches up mysteriously from the picture’s bottom edge.”
American Dorethea Lange (1895–1965) provides us with a rich archive of life in America in the 1930s and 1940s, from the Great Depression to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
She said in a 1965 interview: “I have made a few photographs in my life that have really taken hold, they’ve really taken root all over the world. They’re no longer my own. For some peculiar, strange reason that I don’t understand, that I haven’t the answer for, why those? They have something in them that has reached people all over.”
The exhibition, organized in association with New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is open until January 30, 2022 on the ground floor of the National Gallery’s West Building.