Women's HERstory Month Day Thirteen (Part 2): Women and Photojournalism
(Another two post day, cause God we need something not actively rage worthy right now)
An Excerpt from A History of Women Photographers by Naomi Rosenblum
Photography as Information, 1940-2000
Wars tend to affect social practices and change artistic sensibilities; the conflict that the United States entered in 1941 was no exception. Even before war was declared, women were urged to take on assignments previously given to men. At one photography conference held in 1940, Berenice Abbott, Wynn Richards, Edward Steichen, and Florence Vandamm, among others, outlined the roles that women might play in advertising, theatrical photography, photojournalism, and industrial and scientific documentation.1 These distinctions were not as clear-cut as the speakers made them sound.
Documentary photography and photojournalism were, and still are, especially difficult to separate. The former had come to prominence under the auspices of United States government agencies, which had sent photographers into the field during the 1930s to cast light on social conditions in need of change. In addition to their use in publicly sponsored exhibitions, such images frequently appeared in print media. After World War II, as the government withdrew from the business of underwriting photographic projects, private entities (such as large corporations and not-for-profit foundations) and illustrated periodicals took over the function of revealing circumstances and events through socially oriented camera documentation (the civil-rights struggles in the South during the 1960s, conditions in Africa, Asia and eastern Europe in the following decades). At the same time, the responsibility for informing the public about social conditions through still camera images was taken up by books, galleries, and museums (and, of course, television). Photographers who focused on social issues-poverty, child labor, wartime dislocation, and spousal abuse, for instance-often considered the two genres of social documentation and photojournalism “to be pretty much the same thing,” as Mary Ellen Mark noted.
The number of women professional photographers, which had expanded from under five thousand in 1920 to more than eight thousand in 1937, grew again after the United States was drawn into the war; by the mid-1940s another two thousand women were added to the ranks. The manpower drain during the war forced the armed services to train noncombatants for jobs as photographers (as well as other professions, such as aviator). African-American women especially benefited from the need for a large staff to supply the demand for pictures of military hardware, personnel, and operations. Enlisted in the National Security Women’s Corps and (after 1942) the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (later, the Women’s Army Corps, or WAC), black women photographers were, for the first time, able to engage in a wider range of professional activities than just portraiture. Elizabeth “Tex” Williams, who had made the army her career from 1944 on, documented air and ground maneuvers, recorded medical procedures, and provided images for intelligence. In 1949 she became the first black woman admitted to the Signal Corps photography school at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, graduating at the top of her class. Other African-American women photographers who benefited from programs to broaden professional skills included Emma Alice Downs and Grendel A. Howard.
Photojournalism
World War II had an almost immediate impact on women photojournalists. The military’s attitudes toward documenting this war differed greatly from those that had prevailed during World War I. Then, civilians had been virtually barred from photographing on the battlefields, and images by service personnel were strictly censored. Women war correspondents were entirely unacceptable to the military and the media, even though photographs by women of World War I battlefields do exist. British photographer Olive Edis, for one, made idealized images of women volunteers in the ambulance corps and the Voluntary Aid Detachments in Belgium as well as documenting that country’s ruined landscape.
During World War II the U.S. government had come to realize the value of promoting the war effort through publicity; at the same time, picture magazines and daily newspapers in Europe and the Americas eagerly sought camera images to illustrate their reports. Women profited from this greater latitude; as early as 1937 Kati Horna and Gerda Taro documented incidents in the Spanish Civil War. Horna (who also made collages) produced an album of propaganda images for the Spanish Republican government, and Taro, whose work appeared in the French newspapers Ce Soir and Regards, was herself a battlefield casualty. When the armed conflict widened to include the Soviet Union, the Russian former industrial photographer Galina Sankova was allowed to photograph the military action on the eastern front (plate 172); she was one of five Russian women photojournalists covering the war. Kari Berggrav, a Norwegian professional who was assigned by her nation’s high command to cover the German blitzkrieg at Narvik (April 9, 1940), made more than six hundred exposures-most of them lost when she escaped to the United States. Constance Stuart (later Larrabee), who was born in England but spent her youth in South Africa, was sent by South African military intelligence to photograph in Egypt; she became the official war photographer for the South African publication Libertas (plate 173). Later she free-lanced for Life magazine and settled in the United States, becoming a citizen in 1953.
Gwen Dew, traveling in the Far East in 1941, captured the fall of Hong Kong on film before she herself was captured and imprisoned for more than six months by the Japanese, losing in the process thousands of negatives and several reels of motion-picture film. Julia Pirotte, a Polish photographer living in France, recorded street fighting in Marseilles in 1939, at times under fire. Somewhat later Toni Frissell was asked by the United States Army Air Corps to record activities on its bases in England. Thérèse Bonney, an American living in Paris, was the first foreign photojournalist to cover the Russo-Finnish War of 1939-40 and the only one given complete access to the Battle of France, by General Maxime Weygand, the supreme Allied commander. Her 25,000 negatives-including her images of children displaced by war (plate 174), made for various relief organizations-constitute a little-known record of World War II.
Admittedly, the number of women photographing on battlefronts was still minuscule, but the barrier against their covering war had been irreparably breached. Throughout the remainder of the century, women photographers were to be found on the battlefields of Vietnam, Lebanon, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. In the early years, women also were commissioned by relief agencies and by picture magazines in Europe and the United States to make visible the war’s effects on civilians. Lee Miller photographed war-ravaged villages and concentration camp inmates (plate 175) for Vogue. Before Frissell began photographing for the Army Air Corps, the Red Cross had sent her to England to make promotional images for them, and at war’s end it sent Hazel Kingsbury to France to document conditions there.
The most widely acclaimed woman journalist of the era was Margaret Bourke-White, who was assigned by Life to cover the bombardment of Moscow in July 1941; shortly afterward she became an accredited war correspondent for the magazine and the Defense Department (plate 176); and in 1942 she was the first woman to fly on bombing missions from North Africa. Bourke-White’s pictures, which combined clarity and strong visual design with attentiveness to human activity and expression, suited Life’s objectives, whether the focus was on the “good war” or Henry Luce’s “American Century” ideology. In addition, Bourke-White popularized the vocation of photojournalism itself by writing several books that combined autobiography, commentary on topical issues, and photographs.
Photojournalism had become, as the Swiss-born photographer Sabine Weiss explained, “an alibi”-a way that women might “see everything, get everywhere, talk to everybody.” This was especially true for the thirty or so women who had their coverage of far-flung people and places reproduced in National Geographic since the early years of the century. For these individuals, as for women photojournalists in general, the conflicting demands between marriage and career have remained a potent factor in making photojournalism, with its incessant travel, a difficult choice. Bourke-White, for one, chose not to be bound by “golden chains.” Others in the field agreed that being constantly away on assignment was hard on a marriage and even harder on their children. “Men,” noted one part-time photojournalist, “can just devote themselves to their work alone, but women are called upon to be many things at often inconvenient times.”
Credit for making photojournalism more attractive to women must go in part to the female photojournalists who had worked for European periodicals before fleeing the war. For all its nationalistic emphasis on American virtues, Life put to use the talents of a number of these refugee editors and photographers. Lisa Larsen, Nina Leen, and Hansel Mieth (working at times with her free-lancing photographer husband, Otto Hagel)-all from Germany-worked as free-lancers and on the magazine’s staff, providing strong, positive images of American life. Mieth’s valuable contributions (plate 177), which earned her a staff position, became known again fairly recently, although in 1941 she had been considered “one of America’s top-notch photographers.” Starting in 1940 as a free-lancer, Leen became a staffer in 1945, covering a wide range of diverse events in over six hundred assignments. Her preferred subject matter was animal life, and the magazine featured her picture essays on bats, dogs, and reptiles. Before Lisa Larsen’s death in 1959 at only age thirty, she was acclaimed for her overseas camera reportage, receiving the National Press Photographers Association award as the outstanding photographer of 1958.
A few European-born women free-lanced for other American periodicals. Following their arrival in the United States in the late 1930s, Lisette Model, Yolla Niclas, Marion Palfi, and later Eva Rubinstein and Suzanne Szasz published work intermittently in a variety of places. Of course, not all European women émigrés wanted to or were able to make a living in photojournalism; several, among them Trude Fleischmann and Lotte Jacobi, continued as portraitists, while Gerda Peterich turned to architecture as a theme for personal expression.
Women represented only a tiny proportion of the photographers whose works were reproduced on Life’s pages. Of the sixty-nine photographers featured in a 1979 roundup of the magazine’s first ten years, only four women were included: Bourke-White, Mieth, Leen, and Berenice Abbott, whose pictures of New York were reproduced even though they had not been commissioned by the magazine. Other women whose photographs appeared in Life between 1940 and 1970 included Esther Bubley, Pat English, Marie Hansen, Martha Holmes, Ruth Orkin, Nina Howell Starr, and Elizabeth Timberman; most worked as free-lancers, but Hansen and Holmes were on staff. Women working for picture agencies-among them, Eileen Darby, Mary Edwards, Carola Gregor, and Betty Kirk-also had their work reproduced in Life. In 1951 Look magazine hired its first female staff photographer, Charlotte Brooks, who had served an apprenticeship with Barbara Morgan and Life photographer Gjon Mili.
This early support for women proved tenuous; by the late 1950s the work of male photographers dominated the pages of Life, and women found themselves commissioned mainly to handle domestic subjects for the magazine. In the first half of 1969, for example (the same year that the magazine eulogized Bourke-White on her retirement), only five individual images and one spread by women appeared. However, as Time, Inc. (publisher of Life), expanded its roster of magazines to include People and Sports Illustrated, it made use of a greater number of women photographers, both on staff and free-lance; an exhibition mounted in 1993 featured the work of some fifty-nine women whose images had appeared in Time, Inc., publications over the years.
In general, magazine reportage and commercial work in advertising have little staying power, and the work of women photographers of the 1940s and 1950s was no exception. Gloria Hoffman (winner in 1949 of the Condé Nast award for art and photography), Doris Day, Pat Liverwright, Ruth Alexander Nichols, Carola Rust, and Lena Towsley were all professionally active during the 1940s, and their work has all disappeared from view. This obscurity resulted from a number of factors, most notably the pedestrian quality of the images and the absence of an art market for them-factors that affected not only women but also many men active both in day-to-day photojournalism and in advertising. Women, however, did have the additional problem of overcoming the resistance of their male colleagues. On assignment in Florida in 1943, Constance Bannister, an acclaimed photographer of “babies, ballet, and news,” preferred to print in a hotel bathroom after discovering that male competitors had actively sought to destroy her work by putting “hypo in the developer” and scratching her negatives.13 A few years later Vera Jackson found that male colleagues would sometimes “nudge [her] out of position for a good camera angle with a snide remark,” and Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe recalled being shoved and physically abused in the 1960s by male colleagues competing for the best vantage points from the steps of the Federal Court House in Foley Square in New York.
Melissa Farlow noted in an interview that mistakes by women were less acceptable than those by men, and Ruth Orkin recognized that besides having to work harder, women often received “half of what a beginning man would have gotten.” As early as 1943 Bannister claimed that her need to “do better than men” made competition stressful. And when Eve Arnold began her career in magazine photography in the early 1950s, she was considered just a token woman. Sent to do stories about other women and minority groups-topics considered less important by assigning editors-she eventually discovered that the supposedly insignificant theme of women’s work was of interest to a wide readership (plate 178). Inge Morath (plate 179) and Rollie McKenna were able to avoid consignment to women’s subjects by initially concentrating on portraits of artists and writers.
As in the United States after the war, no sharp distinction existed in Europe between documentary photography and photojournalism, and the same photographers were to be found in both genres. Government support of photographic projects had not been common in Europe before World War II, and it was not forthcoming in the immediate postwar years; even later it was only sporadic, varying from country to country. Some photographers financed such projects themselves, others solicited support from regional bodies and publications, still others were eventually commissioned by central authorities. As publication of photographic books became more common, they gave women (and men) another outlet for documentary work.
Source
NGL, as an art student and art history minor, women in the arts is a subject close to my heart, and I'll prolly post a lot more about it. Women in photography in particular have had a particular difficult time of things, especially if they don't shoot traditionally feminine or gender-neutral subject matter.
Who are your favorite lady artists, -P? I'd like to see if there are any particular women I should do posts for, in addition to the ones I'd already set up.
An Excerpt from A History of Women Photographers by Naomi Rosenblum
Photography as Information, 1940-2000
Wars tend to affect social practices and change artistic sensibilities; the conflict that the United States entered in 1941 was no exception. Even before war was declared, women were urged to take on assignments previously given to men. At one photography conference held in 1940, Berenice Abbott, Wynn Richards, Edward Steichen, and Florence Vandamm, among others, outlined the roles that women might play in advertising, theatrical photography, photojournalism, and industrial and scientific documentation.1 These distinctions were not as clear-cut as the speakers made them sound.
Documentary photography and photojournalism were, and still are, especially difficult to separate. The former had come to prominence under the auspices of United States government agencies, which had sent photographers into the field during the 1930s to cast light on social conditions in need of change. In addition to their use in publicly sponsored exhibitions, such images frequently appeared in print media. After World War II, as the government withdrew from the business of underwriting photographic projects, private entities (such as large corporations and not-for-profit foundations) and illustrated periodicals took over the function of revealing circumstances and events through socially oriented camera documentation (the civil-rights struggles in the South during the 1960s, conditions in Africa, Asia and eastern Europe in the following decades). At the same time, the responsibility for informing the public about social conditions through still camera images was taken up by books, galleries, and museums (and, of course, television). Photographers who focused on social issues-poverty, child labor, wartime dislocation, and spousal abuse, for instance-often considered the two genres of social documentation and photojournalism “to be pretty much the same thing,” as Mary Ellen Mark noted.
The number of women professional photographers, which had expanded from under five thousand in 1920 to more than eight thousand in 1937, grew again after the United States was drawn into the war; by the mid-1940s another two thousand women were added to the ranks. The manpower drain during the war forced the armed services to train noncombatants for jobs as photographers (as well as other professions, such as aviator). African-American women especially benefited from the need for a large staff to supply the demand for pictures of military hardware, personnel, and operations. Enlisted in the National Security Women’s Corps and (after 1942) the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (later, the Women’s Army Corps, or WAC), black women photographers were, for the first time, able to engage in a wider range of professional activities than just portraiture. Elizabeth “Tex” Williams, who had made the army her career from 1944 on, documented air and ground maneuvers, recorded medical procedures, and provided images for intelligence. In 1949 she became the first black woman admitted to the Signal Corps photography school at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, graduating at the top of her class. Other African-American women photographers who benefited from programs to broaden professional skills included Emma Alice Downs and Grendel A. Howard.
Photojournalism
World War II had an almost immediate impact on women photojournalists. The military’s attitudes toward documenting this war differed greatly from those that had prevailed during World War I. Then, civilians had been virtually barred from photographing on the battlefields, and images by service personnel were strictly censored. Women war correspondents were entirely unacceptable to the military and the media, even though photographs by women of World War I battlefields do exist. British photographer Olive Edis, for one, made idealized images of women volunteers in the ambulance corps and the Voluntary Aid Detachments in Belgium as well as documenting that country’s ruined landscape.
During World War II the U.S. government had come to realize the value of promoting the war effort through publicity; at the same time, picture magazines and daily newspapers in Europe and the Americas eagerly sought camera images to illustrate their reports. Women profited from this greater latitude; as early as 1937 Kati Horna and Gerda Taro documented incidents in the Spanish Civil War. Horna (who also made collages) produced an album of propaganda images for the Spanish Republican government, and Taro, whose work appeared in the French newspapers Ce Soir and Regards, was herself a battlefield casualty. When the armed conflict widened to include the Soviet Union, the Russian former industrial photographer Galina Sankova was allowed to photograph the military action on the eastern front (plate 172); she was one of five Russian women photojournalists covering the war. Kari Berggrav, a Norwegian professional who was assigned by her nation’s high command to cover the German blitzkrieg at Narvik (April 9, 1940), made more than six hundred exposures-most of them lost when she escaped to the United States. Constance Stuart (later Larrabee), who was born in England but spent her youth in South Africa, was sent by South African military intelligence to photograph in Egypt; she became the official war photographer for the South African publication Libertas (plate 173). Later she free-lanced for Life magazine and settled in the United States, becoming a citizen in 1953.
Gwen Dew, traveling in the Far East in 1941, captured the fall of Hong Kong on film before she herself was captured and imprisoned for more than six months by the Japanese, losing in the process thousands of negatives and several reels of motion-picture film. Julia Pirotte, a Polish photographer living in France, recorded street fighting in Marseilles in 1939, at times under fire. Somewhat later Toni Frissell was asked by the United States Army Air Corps to record activities on its bases in England. Thérèse Bonney, an American living in Paris, was the first foreign photojournalist to cover the Russo-Finnish War of 1939-40 and the only one given complete access to the Battle of France, by General Maxime Weygand, the supreme Allied commander. Her 25,000 negatives-including her images of children displaced by war (plate 174), made for various relief organizations-constitute a little-known record of World War II.
Admittedly, the number of women photographing on battlefronts was still minuscule, but the barrier against their covering war had been irreparably breached. Throughout the remainder of the century, women photographers were to be found on the battlefields of Vietnam, Lebanon, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. In the early years, women also were commissioned by relief agencies and by picture magazines in Europe and the United States to make visible the war’s effects on civilians. Lee Miller photographed war-ravaged villages and concentration camp inmates (plate 175) for Vogue. Before Frissell began photographing for the Army Air Corps, the Red Cross had sent her to England to make promotional images for them, and at war’s end it sent Hazel Kingsbury to France to document conditions there.
The most widely acclaimed woman journalist of the era was Margaret Bourke-White, who was assigned by Life to cover the bombardment of Moscow in July 1941; shortly afterward she became an accredited war correspondent for the magazine and the Defense Department (plate 176); and in 1942 she was the first woman to fly on bombing missions from North Africa. Bourke-White’s pictures, which combined clarity and strong visual design with attentiveness to human activity and expression, suited Life’s objectives, whether the focus was on the “good war” or Henry Luce’s “American Century” ideology. In addition, Bourke-White popularized the vocation of photojournalism itself by writing several books that combined autobiography, commentary on topical issues, and photographs.
Photojournalism had become, as the Swiss-born photographer Sabine Weiss explained, “an alibi”-a way that women might “see everything, get everywhere, talk to everybody.” This was especially true for the thirty or so women who had their coverage of far-flung people and places reproduced in National Geographic since the early years of the century. For these individuals, as for women photojournalists in general, the conflicting demands between marriage and career have remained a potent factor in making photojournalism, with its incessant travel, a difficult choice. Bourke-White, for one, chose not to be bound by “golden chains.” Others in the field agreed that being constantly away on assignment was hard on a marriage and even harder on their children. “Men,” noted one part-time photojournalist, “can just devote themselves to their work alone, but women are called upon to be many things at often inconvenient times.”
Credit for making photojournalism more attractive to women must go in part to the female photojournalists who had worked for European periodicals before fleeing the war. For all its nationalistic emphasis on American virtues, Life put to use the talents of a number of these refugee editors and photographers. Lisa Larsen, Nina Leen, and Hansel Mieth (working at times with her free-lancing photographer husband, Otto Hagel)-all from Germany-worked as free-lancers and on the magazine’s staff, providing strong, positive images of American life. Mieth’s valuable contributions (plate 177), which earned her a staff position, became known again fairly recently, although in 1941 she had been considered “one of America’s top-notch photographers.” Starting in 1940 as a free-lancer, Leen became a staffer in 1945, covering a wide range of diverse events in over six hundred assignments. Her preferred subject matter was animal life, and the magazine featured her picture essays on bats, dogs, and reptiles. Before Lisa Larsen’s death in 1959 at only age thirty, she was acclaimed for her overseas camera reportage, receiving the National Press Photographers Association award as the outstanding photographer of 1958.
A few European-born women free-lanced for other American periodicals. Following their arrival in the United States in the late 1930s, Lisette Model, Yolla Niclas, Marion Palfi, and later Eva Rubinstein and Suzanne Szasz published work intermittently in a variety of places. Of course, not all European women émigrés wanted to or were able to make a living in photojournalism; several, among them Trude Fleischmann and Lotte Jacobi, continued as portraitists, while Gerda Peterich turned to architecture as a theme for personal expression.
Women represented only a tiny proportion of the photographers whose works were reproduced on Life’s pages. Of the sixty-nine photographers featured in a 1979 roundup of the magazine’s first ten years, only four women were included: Bourke-White, Mieth, Leen, and Berenice Abbott, whose pictures of New York were reproduced even though they had not been commissioned by the magazine. Other women whose photographs appeared in Life between 1940 and 1970 included Esther Bubley, Pat English, Marie Hansen, Martha Holmes, Ruth Orkin, Nina Howell Starr, and Elizabeth Timberman; most worked as free-lancers, but Hansen and Holmes were on staff. Women working for picture agencies-among them, Eileen Darby, Mary Edwards, Carola Gregor, and Betty Kirk-also had their work reproduced in Life. In 1951 Look magazine hired its first female staff photographer, Charlotte Brooks, who had served an apprenticeship with Barbara Morgan and Life photographer Gjon Mili.
This early support for women proved tenuous; by the late 1950s the work of male photographers dominated the pages of Life, and women found themselves commissioned mainly to handle domestic subjects for the magazine. In the first half of 1969, for example (the same year that the magazine eulogized Bourke-White on her retirement), only five individual images and one spread by women appeared. However, as Time, Inc. (publisher of Life), expanded its roster of magazines to include People and Sports Illustrated, it made use of a greater number of women photographers, both on staff and free-lance; an exhibition mounted in 1993 featured the work of some fifty-nine women whose images had appeared in Time, Inc., publications over the years.
In general, magazine reportage and commercial work in advertising have little staying power, and the work of women photographers of the 1940s and 1950s was no exception. Gloria Hoffman (winner in 1949 of the Condé Nast award for art and photography), Doris Day, Pat Liverwright, Ruth Alexander Nichols, Carola Rust, and Lena Towsley were all professionally active during the 1940s, and their work has all disappeared from view. This obscurity resulted from a number of factors, most notably the pedestrian quality of the images and the absence of an art market for them-factors that affected not only women but also many men active both in day-to-day photojournalism and in advertising. Women, however, did have the additional problem of overcoming the resistance of their male colleagues. On assignment in Florida in 1943, Constance Bannister, an acclaimed photographer of “babies, ballet, and news,” preferred to print in a hotel bathroom after discovering that male competitors had actively sought to destroy her work by putting “hypo in the developer” and scratching her negatives.13 A few years later Vera Jackson found that male colleagues would sometimes “nudge [her] out of position for a good camera angle with a snide remark,” and Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe recalled being shoved and physically abused in the 1960s by male colleagues competing for the best vantage points from the steps of the Federal Court House in Foley Square in New York.
Melissa Farlow noted in an interview that mistakes by women were less acceptable than those by men, and Ruth Orkin recognized that besides having to work harder, women often received “half of what a beginning man would have gotten.” As early as 1943 Bannister claimed that her need to “do better than men” made competition stressful. And when Eve Arnold began her career in magazine photography in the early 1950s, she was considered just a token woman. Sent to do stories about other women and minority groups-topics considered less important by assigning editors-she eventually discovered that the supposedly insignificant theme of women’s work was of interest to a wide readership (plate 178). Inge Morath (plate 179) and Rollie McKenna were able to avoid consignment to women’s subjects by initially concentrating on portraits of artists and writers.
As in the United States after the war, no sharp distinction existed in Europe between documentary photography and photojournalism, and the same photographers were to be found in both genres. Government support of photographic projects had not been common in Europe before World War II, and it was not forthcoming in the immediate postwar years; even later it was only sporadic, varying from country to country. Some photographers financed such projects themselves, others solicited support from regional bodies and publications, still others were eventually commissioned by central authorities. As publication of photographic books became more common, they gave women (and men) another outlet for documentary work.
Source
NGL, as an art student and art history minor, women in the arts is a subject close to my heart, and I'll prolly post a lot more about it. Women in photography in particular have had a particular difficult time of things, especially if they don't shoot traditionally feminine or gender-neutral subject matter.
Who are your favorite lady artists, -P? I'd like to see if there are any particular women I should do posts for, in addition to the ones I'd already set up.