Hello, everybody. First of all, I'd like to thank the organisers of the conference, which is part of Oxford photo,
which this year is exploring the history and presence of women in photography.
Special tasks and Karen task for inviting me in can forgive me, great technical assistance.
And hello, everyone, and thank you for coming. Coming into photography in Britain in the early seventies, as I did, was to enter a very male world.
Women photography students were rare. Only a few women photographers found a place in major shows and collections.
The writings of U.S. and European collectors and photo historians influenced very much what photography should
be exhibited and where the presence of almost all male photo agencies such as Magnum Photos was important,
as they were one of the first photo groups to really use PR and exhibitions to disseminate their work.
The fact that women were rarely given Magnum membership meant that women documentaries and photo reporters were left out of the
expansion of photography in the 70s and 80s as the medium became more and more a part of museum and gallery programming in the U.K.,
where women rarely find a platform from the 1970s onwards with some theoretical, political and autobiographical writing about photography.
But I'd like to return to that later.
When I began to work on the other observers, my book and exhibition about women photographers in the 1980s was against this background.
The post-war collecting establishment, which included Beaumont Newhall, Helmut Sunshine, John Tokarski and some stuff to name only a few.
Many active in the US was immensely powerful. Both gun shy and Newhall wrote influential photo histories.
Neither included many women photographers. Women photo curators at major institutions were not unusual in the seventies and eighties,
as photography struggled to carve out a place in the highly stratified museums of the US, UK and Europe.
Young women curators sensed an opportunity, but the presence of these women didn't necessarily mean that more women photographers would be exhibited.
A few women, including Yvonne Arnold,
were members of Magnum or had contributed to an iconic project such as the Farm Security Administration in the US.
See Dorothea Lange and Marian pose Woolcott or had become war correspondents, for instance, Margaret White or Lee Miller or in fashion,
say, Sarah Moon or Deborah Turbeville all received exposure during the post-war re-emergence of photography.
Some, like Diane Arbus and later Nan Goldin, became major museum and gallery exhibitors.
But these were the exceptions. So why was so little women's photography seemed to be important?
Well written about or exhibited, there isn't one answer to this,
but one way of thinking about it could be to think about the way that creative or art photography,
for want of a better term was considered in the post-war period,
and especially in the 1960s and 70s,
in the attempt to retain regain the cultural credence that photography had lost since its heggie innovative days of the into war period.
Photographers were modelled as Mistick figures. Poet Shame's almost divorced from the everyday myths developed.
William Eggleston, the Pioneer colourist, was a gun toting Southern aristocrat with a whiff of danger.
Minor. Why? It was a mystic guru and the documentary's guy Winogrand, a kind of voiceless high priest of imagery photography,
had a masculine and intellectual glamour which could not easily encompass women's photographers lives.
Helen Moss scrapped two politically driven and in her Swanage and later Oxford studios,
managing a successful business and family, as well as producing some of the most innovative photographs of the anti-war years.
Magilla Bond running a large London portrait studio with many employees while producing her remarkable goddess's portraits of society
women dressed as mythological figures and writing an autobiography which portrayed it all as a roller coaster of fun and business.
Born out of political consciousness and technical innovation, these kind of lives didn't really fit in.
For the powerful if small scale photo networks, which had begun to form in the U.K. from the mid 1960s onwards,
photography was a serious business and a historical trajectory was developed which income, compas formulas, desires and masculine poetics.
See Bill Brandt, Raymond More, Chris it Ken Grant for an example of such a trajectory.
In 1973, Vienna curator Mark Heyworth booth another youthful arrival on the British photo scene and he became a key figure,
put together a group show called The Land with Bill Brandt as a guest selector.
The land demonstrated the same interest in the revisioning of photography as meditative and poetic in
opposition to the notably business focussed and technologically innovative history of British photography,
which was evidenced in the work of photographers such as Imagineer Bond, Dorothy Wilding to name only two experimental strategic.
A woman's experience of life and work in Bond, for instance, remained an almost invisible for many years,
with no major solo show of her work taking place until the British council's Be Original or Die, which took to 40 international venues in 2014.
But for those who began to look in the 1980s, there were clues as to the existence of women's work in British photography.
In Helmut's analysis, Gun Shine's Concise History of Photography, first published by Tamsen Hudson in 1965,
and a very important and surprisingly innovative book of its time.
There was a glimmer of work by women. The Gun Shine's embraced the idea that photography was not entirely a formalist or documentary act,
but also an expression of Bohemia in the gun shine's history.
I found the work of Winifred Kasson, the pioneering surrealist photographer who worked extensively with Summarisation,
as did Helena Spratt and Barbara Casina in their UK studios.
Kasson, pioneering surrealist photographer, was a clue to the women who lay beyond her out of sight but not out of reach.
There were also substantial bodies of work by women in UK museums, which had been carefully conserved, if not much exposed for many years.
The photographs of Lady How Auden and Anna Atkins' in Vienna in the British Museum.
The work of the World War One nurses. The Two Women of service.
And from Farnborough, Florence Farnborough.
An English nurse who rose early one morning to take photographs of sleeping soldiers on the Russian front and added them to her collection,
all at the Imperial War Museum.
Pockets of excellence existed elsewhere in the collection, which Terence Pepper was building at the National Portrait Gallery,
including work by Barbara Casina and in Mock Health Foods support of the British artist Helen Chadwick.
These were bold moves in the 1970s and 80s when so much of thinking, talking and collecting photography revolved around the Masters.
Bill Brandt. Ansel Adams, only Cartier-Bresson. Walker Evans.
Eugene Smith. William Eggleston. And others, too numerous to mention.
Another major barrier had been broken in the 1960s when director Brian Robertson
invited photography to car to show her work at the White Chapel Gallery in London.
Their first photos show.
Indeed, cause only London one until her retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery decades later, car show at the White Chapel.
They the Foundation for Photography at the gallery, which was successfully continued by subsequent curators, most notably Nicholas Serota.
Pockets of women's work existed all over the UK in family estates such as Walsh.
It's his guardianship of his sister Edith two to Hart's photographs with the photographer herself.
Barbara Casina, Helen Spratt, Margaret Monck. Or in unexpected places such as the National Museum of Labour History in Limehouse,
which held detection of copy photographs by Nora Smyth, the suffragette photographer with the originals held at the University of Leiden.
As well as being scattered, these archives can be difficult to explore.
There aren't always sets of prints. Women photographers set busy lives and photography was not always central to them.
Painter Vanessa Bell. Small snapshots are kept with their original kemmis on below title archive, together with other papers.
They are regarded as part of the story of the life of a painter rather than a photographer.
For me, the journey, the title character, Colin Ford, invited me to make an exhibition at the newly opened National Museum of Photography,
Film and Television in the early 1980s was an exciting and revealing on full of stories, effort, imagination, business sense and experimentation.
It could also be a melancholy experience of important archives who have no homes to go to or a lack of resources to fund their preservation.
I was struck by the sadness of this, the fact that so many important bodies of work were being cared for by elderly women whose careers,
as so many photographic careers are, were fragmented and scattered.
Many of the women I spoke to, though, valuing the work they had done in photography, struggled to see how this could be of interest to others.
The testimony, the testimony needs of five of them Helen Muskrat, Grace Robertson, Ursula Parry Slip,
Barbara Asema and Margaret Munk recorded in the Channel four series five women photographers in 1986.
At least one of these on Halema spread is viewable on Vimeo. And there is a search in my archive, which is at the Martin Parr Foundation.
In that collection, the LCAC Education Unit also made a series of interviews based on the five women in
the Channel four series and also included contemporary photographer Joy Gregory.
Unedited versions of these tapes are also in the archive at the Pearl Foundation and the women in photography boxes in the archive,
which contain manuscripts, posters, letters and tapes from the project.
Photographers Jackie Taylor and Anna Escobar made use of this material when they constructed the exhibition,
the other observers in 2017 as part of an LCAC internship.
The combination of Channel four, Drago Krass, the National Museum of Photography,
Film and Television and the London County Council was powerful and influential.
And this meant that women's women's photography was increasingly discussed.
Of particular interest to me in this period were Andrea Phishers 1987 book Let
US Now Place Famous Women and John Munchy Salami Ashes 1985 book Viewfinders,
Klaus-Peter B. Holmquist Camera Feeds and Kodak Girls.
Strange title for a very interesting book which was published in the US in 1989,
an anthology of short extracts of writing by early women photographers in America.
Plus, Amy rules on cable analysis of the letters of Tina Dotti at the Centre for Creative Photography in Arizona.
In the Fastforward conferences, which are co convened with Anna Fox and other partners,
many fascinating women photographers that come to light and we can and can be seen in full on the Fastforward Web site.
A special double issue of the Journal of Photography and Culture is coming up before Christmas,
which takes some of these papers plus papers given at the Fastforward workshops held in Nigeria, Finland, India, Brazil and the UK.
I'd also like to mention the great work of Four Corners and Monica BOEM for their recent
exhibition and conference on women photography women refugee photographers in Britain.
For me, the other observers project was the beginning of a three decade long exploration of women in photography, which hasn't yet concluded.
In 1994 and Fox and I took the idea of the Woolworth's exhibition to mark with Booth that the BNA,
this show explored women interrogating the aftermath of war and included the work of Hannah Collins, Sophie Wistful Haber lawyer,
McIvor Elizabeth Williams Jew, and Judith Joy Ross, a group of women, including myself, Amanda Hopkinson, Shirley Reid,
Grace Roberts and Gracetown and a fox had initiated the idea of signals, a nationwide festival of women's photography.
The group came together and the commitment to women in photography and a feeling
that things were not quick changing as quickly as they should in the museum sector.
Major Quileute shows still included many fewer women than men. We invited all institutions to take part and hundreds dead.
New groups of women photographers swarmed all over the UK and woodblocks became a central part of the festival.
It was the first all women photo exhibition at the BNA,
and although the signals files were unfortunately destroyed after the group broke up, we were able to print catalogue.
So the full programme has been preserved.
It included Edwardian women photographers at the National Portrait Gallery and Jo Spence at the Royal Festival Hall.
Also, some of the prostitutes of the time it become begun to come online in the independent journalist Jane Richards wrote.
If the idea of a festival devoted to women photographers fills you with dread or strident feminist ideology and questionable exclusivity,
the nationwide event signals coming your way soon promises to be a pleasant surprise.
Interest in women's photography have grown throughout the late late 1980s and 90s.
As someone who is writing about photography regularly, I was very interested in the ways that women wrote about themselves and their careers and the
ways in which they had constructed sophisticated theories around photography and its history.
The writer Alice Heron and I this was originally a member of Haply Flashes,
compiled a 500 page anthology of women's writing on photography called Illuminations,
ranging from the autobiographical Reflections of Margaret White to the theoretical writings of Abigail Solomon, Godchaux and Russell in Kreiss.
Illuminations was published in 1996 by I.B. tourists and Duke University and was part of the same signals collective of effort.
One of the most memorable pieces of writing illuminations out of many.
For me was Mary Walter Marion's. What Should We Tell the Children?
Photography and its textbooks, which looked at the ways in which influential post-war historians event for and emphasised notions of the master
photographer and the master work at the expense of the social and cultural contextualisation of the medium.
Women from the late 1960s onwards have explored the history and presence of women in photography in many different ways.
Always a job for women. Increasing numbers of women practise photography professionally in a small pilot project I made last year,
contrasting the careers of three women photographers in two years with three contemporary women photographers.
There was surprising similarities patchworks of different projects from teaching to studio portraiture.
Were a feature of both groups, women of all was trained to be photographers.
I did by working with established practitioners or in more formal training, which many early practitioners undertook a technical college colleges.
Photography has rarely been a hobby for women. Camera clubs have traditionally had a predominantly male membership.
It has been a profession and a passion, a way to make living, to become independent, to circumvent the establishment.
That's all for me. I'm very much looking forward to the rest of the day and your responses and questions.
Thank you for listening.