"I know what I’m doing" – Female Empowerment and Gendered Ideas of Photography in the Transatlantic Camera Club Network
Over the past decades, women photographers have gained increasing visibility in histories of the medium, from Frances Benjamin Johnston’s influential work as practitioner and collector to the transatlantic line-up on display in the seminal exhibition “Who’s afraid of women photographers? 1839-1945” at the Musée d’Orsay & the Musée de l’Orangerie (2015). While these histories have unearthed many an unknown practitioner and drawn a more complex picture of women in photography around 1900, they remain largely monographic, focusing on individual achievements and hardships. In this paper, I explore camera club networks as places for women to bond, to improve, and to collectively navigate patterns of gendered exclusion. The West Coast camera clubs – with twice the average female membership of U.S. clubs – provide an apt point of departure for a larger inquiry into practice, partnerships, and emancipation. While the male-dominated territories of the Sierra Nevada, Gold Rush pioneers, and industrial extraction seemed to confine women to domesticity, it was in fact this very geography which allowed clubwomen from Seattle to Los Angeles to disrupt Victorian-era stereotypes and create lasting visibility for one another. Ultimately, I will trace how place and practice, from the darkroom to the outdoors, transformed the gender-biased camera club community into a platform for national and international exchange and exhibition.
Date:
12 October 2023, 16:00 (Thursday, 1st week, Michaelmas 2023)
Venue:
Maison Française d'Oxford, 2-10 Norham Rd, Oxford OX2 6SE
Speaker:
Dr Carolin Görgen (Sorbonne Université)
Part of:
Conference: Love and Lenses: Photographic Couples, Gender Relationships, and Transatlantic Networks in the Long Nineteenth Century
Booking required?:
Required
Booking url:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_UsqMYbm4S62y5SgY0-TJBw#/registration
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editor:
Belinda Clark
