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Women's Camera Work: Seven Propositions in Search of a Theory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
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Anaked woman stands before an artist seated in front of his easel, the elegance of his hat and frock coat, his little Vandyke beard somewhat anachronistic for 1914 (Figure 1). Light molds the back of the woman's body, outlining her outstretched right arm and her bent right leg, accenting her discarded dress draped over the seat of the chair. The shadows, the dark places of her body, echo the partial covering of the representation of nature that hangs like a sign on the screen on the wall behind her. All of the conventions of the artist's studio are here, from the black-and-white tiles to the linking of woman both with nature and pet; but this is a photograph, and it documents without irony certain institutions and practices - a form of representation — that dominated “art” photography at the turn of the century. The tradition upon which this photograph, The Artist and His Model (1914) by Richard Polack, draws, and the ideology to which it subscribes, has to do with notions of power. The light that idealizes, the gaze that possesses, are not always gentle, as Foucault suggests, but sometimes as penetrating as the surgeon's knife. The context for photographs like this one would include Eadweard Muybridge's studies of “the geometry of bodies” of 1887, a series of figures in motion called Animal Locomotion (Figure 2), as well as a whole range of representations of naked human bodies, from what Martha Banta calls the “soft porn” of Clarence White's and Alfred Stieglitz's “genteel ‘art photography’” to E. J. Bellocq's photographs of Storyville prostitutes to anatomical documentary studies for ethnographic, military, and medical purposes.
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References
NOTES
1. Noel, Bernard, “The Eye's Touch,” trans. Chevallier, Sheila and Faure, Marianne Tinnell, introduction to The Nude (New York: Pantheon, 1981), n.p.Google Scholar
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5. My focus here is on representations of the nude female body. Nude males were also the subject of photographs made at this time, for example by Thomas Eakins and Eadweard Muybridge, discussed below, and F. Holland Day, who photographed his own naked body.
6. Parker, Rozika and Pollock, Griselda, Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul/Pantheon, 1981), p. 115.Google Scholar
7. Gover, C. Jane's The Positive Image: Women Photographers in Turn of the Century America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988)Google Scholar was in press when I began this work; it provides a good historical overview of women photographers in this period but does not take up the theoretical issues with which I am concerned. Another valuable resource is Naef, Weston's The Collection of Alfred Stieglitz (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Viking, 1978).Google Scholar
8. This is Joan Wallach Scott's criticism (on p. 40) of Gilligan, Carol's In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).Google ScholarScott, 's Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)Google Scholar has been helpful in thinking through the problem of essentialism.
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The word theory is bound historically to the gaze in Western culture, Page duBois notes: “The observers, the witnesses, the beholders of the world have been both male and female, but only the male spectators, the theòroi [in ancient Greece], have been official ambassadors, named to see.” Feminists need not dismiss theory, she points out, but need to find a place from which to see, to observe not sameness but difference-historical difference. Going on to describe the way in which male theorists - Freud, Lacan - have most often seen sameness, she argues for a historicizing of psychoanalysis, for a recognition that “the ideology about gender difference, which in capitalist culture supports all other versions of hierarchical difference, is a cultural product.” Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 10.Google Scholar
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16. The very word landscape implies that the scene framed in the window behind the model has also been shaped into an artifact by human work, just as she herself is being turned into something to look at. The pitcher is an old and oftenused symbol of woman's body, probably originating with Rebecca at the well in Genesis.
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18. “So many aspects of Renaissance culture, its painting, its literature, its historiography are born of this perception [that man is the measure of all things] of an active confidence in human powers,” Alpers writes. “And so much are we heir to this view of man, or more particularly so much are art historians heir to this view of artistic representation, that it is hard to see it as a particular modality and not just the way representational art is.” She goes on to link the problems posed by photography to this mode of visualization, of representation. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 43.Google Scholar
19. Banta, , Imaging American Women, pp. 14–15, 213.Google Scholar Banta draws here on Charles Saunders Peirce's argument that signs, images, and types speak to truths that lie fully within the scope of human experience. Peirce had by 1868 developed his theory about the relation between object (the thing or signifier, that arouses interest), representation (the sign that stands for the object's signified meaning), and interpretant (the person who appraises the arousing sign). This relation leads not only to the assignment of meaning to the object, but also influences the way we behave toward that object (Imaging American Women, pp. 13–14).Google Scholar
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34. Sontag, , On Photography, p. 6.Google Scholar Much new work has been done recently on FSA photographers. See Shloss, , In Visible LightGoogle Scholar, chs. 5 and 6; Levine, Lawrence, “The Historian and the Icon: Photography and the History of the American People in the 1930s and 1940s,”Google Scholar and Trachtenberg, Alan, “From Image to Story: Reading the File,” in Documenting America, ed. Fleischhauer, Carl and Brannan, Beverly W. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 15–42, 43–73Google Scholar; Daniel, Pete, Foresta, Merry, Stange, Maren, and Stein, Sally, Official Images: New Deal Photography (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Fisher, Andrea, Let Us Now Praise Famous Women: Women Photographers for the US Government, 1935–1944 (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul/Pandora, 1987).Google Scholar
35. There is very likely a good reason why Henry Adams skipped the photography exhibit – the depression and suicide in 1885 of his photographer-wife, Marian, (“Clover”)Google Scholar Hooper Adams, caused by her swallowing the potassium cyanide she used in developing photographs. Henry Adams had discouraged her work, preventing the publication of her impressive photograph of George Bancroft, for example. He wrote to Gilder, Richard Watson, editor of The CenturyGoogle Scholar Magazine, using the editorial “we”: “You know our modesty… [and we decline to] flaunt… our photographs in The Century” (cited in Kaledin, , Education of Mrs. Henry Adams, p. 191).Google Scholar The photographer's husband had little respect for photography as an art -he had ridiculed Emerson for either “extreme sublimation or tenuity of intelligence for asserting that photographs gave more pleasure than paintings,” and after his wife's death declared, “I hate photographs, abstractly because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I should ever get by imagination” (cited in Levenson, J. C., The Mind and Art of Henry Adams [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957], p. 10).Google Scholar
36. Information about this exhibit is drawn from Quitslund, Toby, Frances Benjamin Johnston and Her Feminine Colleagues, published with Women Artists in Washington Collections (College Park, Md.: University of Maryland Art Gallery and Women's Caucus for Art, exhibition catalogue, 1979).Google Scholar A collection of letters from exhibitors to Johnston is in the Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division.
37. Quitslund, , Frances Benjamin Johnston, pp. 99–100.Google Scholar Alice Austin of Boston is not to be confused with Alice Austen of Staten Island, New York, who produced a wealth of images of women engaged in various types of communal, even intimate activities - athletic, social, travel, and play - but whose work was not part of the exhibition that Johnston organized in 1900. Austen is worth a study of her own. See Novotny, Ann, Alice's World: The Life and Photography of an American Original, Alice Austen, 1866–1952 (Old Greenwich, Conn.: Chatham Press, 1976)Google Scholar; and Gover, , The Positive Image, pp. 115–23.Google Scholar
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