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News from PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Office of Communications
Stanhope Hall
Princeton, New Jersey 08544-5264
Telephone 609-258-3601; Fax 609-258-1301
CONTACT: Ruta Smithson (609) 258-3763
Women Photographers featured in
Princeton University Art Museum Exhibition
Exhibition Dates: October 6, 2001, through January
6, 2002
PRINCETON -- "Camera Women," a selective survey of the
history of photography from its inception to the present
from the perspective of the woman photographer, will be on
view at the Princeton University Art Museum from October 6,
2001, through January 6, 2002. The exhibition will travel to
the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, January
25 through March 24, 2002.
Organized by Carol Armstrong, the Doris Stevens Professor
in Women's Studies and Professor of Art and Archaeology at
Princeton, the exhibition evolved out of the fall 2000
seminar "Women in Photography" and is drawn primarily from
the Museum's collection.
"The seminar asked how a history of women photographers
might differ from the history of photography as it is
usually told. What could be gained by considering the
photographic output of a single sex? Given the multitude of
photographs that objectify the female body, what occurs when
women are on the other side of the lens? Are the results any
less objectifying? Assuming that 'femininity' is a
culturally constructed notion, does it make sense to claim
that photographs by women are necessarily feminine, or
feminist?" writes Martha Weiss, graduate student in the
Department of Art and Archaeology, in the introduction to
the exhibition.
The nineteenth-century "lady amateurs" who open the
exhibition were upper-class nonprofessionals with the time
and means to devote to photography. Because the institutions
that had long restricted women's involvement with arts such
as painting and sculpture were not established for
photography, the new medium was almost as accessible to
these women as it was to their male counterparts. Within the
confines of the domestic sphere, Julia Margaret Cameron
posed friends, family, and household staff, and Anna Atkins
created cameraless cyanotypes by placing botanical specimens
onto photosensitized paper, which she then exposed to
sunlight.
With a loosening of constraints on women's roles at the
turn of the century, the camera women of this era made
pictures under a greater variety of guises: as snap-shooting
chroniclers of the family, professionals, and exhibiting
artists. Frances Benjamin Johnston and Gertrude
Käsebier had their own portrait studios, and almost all
were involved with the Photo-Secession, the American
organization that championed photography as art. For much of
the twentieth century, women participated in the expanding
roles of photography, as avant-garde and high-modernist
artists, street photographers, photojournalists, and
documentary photographers. Some works indicate the
"feminine" through subject matter or emphasis on closeness
and tactility, as in the work of Tina Modotti or Florence
Henri. Others, such as Berenice Abbott's view of New York,
do not overtly suggest the gender of the maker.
Many of the contemporary camera women are more explicitly
feminist than their predecessors. Sherrie Levine's
re-photographed version of Walker Evans's iconic work
challenges male-centered notions of originality and genius,
while the staged scenes of Cindy Sherman and Eileen Cowin
mimic the depiction of women in film and television. Through
strategies such as appropriation, staging, and the
combination of text and image, these photographers seek to
undermine sexual, and in some cases, racial stereotypes, or
to critique modernist institutions such as the museum or art
history itself. Others pursue the aesthetic ends of art
photography in the traditionally "feminine" domains of the
kitchen, attic, and private spheres of home and family.
The goal of the exhibition is not to present a
comprehensive history of women photographers, but rather to
raise the questions addressed in the seminar, and to suggest
some possible, if conflicting, answers.
Related Programs
Gallery Talk: "CAMERA WOMEN" by Carol Armstrong,
the Doris Stevens Professor in Women's Studies and Professor
of Art and Archaeology. Friday, October 26, at 12:30 p.m.
and Sunday, October 28, at 3 p.m. at the Art Museum
Conference: "WOMEN ARTISTS AT THE MILLENIUM,"
sponsored by the Program in the Study of Women and Gender
and the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton
University. Friday and Saturday, November 9 and 10, 2001,
101 McCormick Hall
The Art Museum is open to the public without charge. Free
highlights tours of the collection are given every Saturday
at 2:00 p.m. The Museum is open Tuesday through Saturday
from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and on Sunday from 1:00 to 5:00
p.m. It is closed on Monday and major holidays. The Museum
Shop closes at 5:00 p.m. The Museum is located in the middle
of the Princeton University campus. Picasso's large
sculpture Head of a Woman stands in front. For
further information, please call (609) 258-3788.
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