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In a work of staggering beauty and immense learning, Rosenblum presents a comprehensive history of women's accomplishments in photography around the world and throughout the entire history of the medium, from the mid-1800s to the present. She explores the work of some 240 photographers, from Anna Atkins, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Frances Benjamin Johnston to Tina Modotti, Lisette Model, Margaret Bourke-White, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Susan Meiselas, and Cindy Sherman. Includes 263 photographs, 30 in color. Extensive bibliography. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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INTRODUCTION Why Women? Women have been actively involved with photography ever since the medium was first introduced in 1839. They were drawn to it professionally and personally, finding it an effective means both to earn a living and to express ideas and feelings. An easily achieved skill adaptable to a wide variety of uses, photography offered women a more congenial discipline than the traditional visual arts of painting and sculpture. The barriers to their participation in photography were lower, and recognition often came faster than in the other arts. If women had fared comparatively well in photography, why do they merit a separate study? And why is it now necessary to revise and update this study, which first appeared in 1994, for a third edition? There are several answers to these questions and several more questions to ask. Have women and their photographs been as visible as they should be in view of their numbers and past influence? Have inquiries into their activities and their art been as rigorous and as insightful as the studies of their male colleagues? Have their contributions been understood in the context of the medium's overall development? And how has the situation changed over the past few decades? Research suggests that until fairly recent times women's work in photography did not receive its due consideration. Because the selection of what shall be remembered had been done throughout most of photographic history by male scholars, women tended to be dismissed or slighted. This process obscured significant contributions by some once well known individuals, and it ignored entirely those who never made it into the spotlight. In 1958, for example, no women were named by leaders in the field of photography as among the "10 greatest photographers." Women were never mentioned in connection with the prehistory of photography, although a Chinese woman scientist, Huang Lu, is said to have added a lens to the camera obscura in the early nineteenth century, and the German painter Friederike Wilhelmine von Wunsch announced a process of making portraits with light-sensitive materials in early 1839. And images created by women or jointly by spousal teams are sometimes transformed by history into the work of a male only, as happened in the case of Rogi Andre, Harriet and Robert Christopher Tytler, and Carolyn and Edwin Gledhill. Women were consistently scanted in the general histories of the medium from which most people gained their knowledge of photography's development. For instance, Beaumont Newhall's 1982 revision of his influential History of Photography from 1839 to Present Day lists fourteen women--three more than Newell's 1964 revision, which had two fewer than the original 1949 edition. In Masterpieces of Photography , a 1986 compendium of highlights from the George Eastman House collection, 8 of the 194 photographers were women; this imbalance has been redressed somewhat in that institution's latest catalog, which includes 39 women among approximately 300 photographers; that is, about 13 percent. In two of the publications that appeared in 1989 to mark 150 years of photography--Mike Weaver's Art of Photography, 1839-1989 and John Szarkowski's summation, Photography until Now , women constitute fewer than 10 percent of those included. Representation has improved in Nouvelle Histoire de la Photographie (The New History of Photography) , edited by Michel Frizot, which appeared first in France in 1994. This compendium of essays makes reference to some 60 women and its bibliography includes work by 23. Granted, these histories and surveys embrace the entire span of photography, including the beginning years when women were not as active as they would later become, but works dealing with the twentieth century have also neglected women. A 1950 summary of American work, entitled Photography at Mid-Century , included just 28 women among 225 men, or a little more than 12 percent. A signal improvement on these figures can be seen in a 1999 publication based on the Hallmark Collection; An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital , by Keith Davis, indexes about 100 women, with illustrations by some 80. Another bias is revealed by way women's contributions have been handled in text and illustrations in the historical and critical literature. In American Photography (1984), Jonathan Green's discussion of trends in the medium since 1945, 45 women photographers are mentioned but merit only 27 reproductions compared to 245 by 195 men. The work of Walker Evans, for example, warrants eleven illustrations and forty-four text references compared to one reproduction of and four references to that of Dorothea Lange. More recently, in recognition of Lange's "enormous influence on photographers," An American Century of Photography gives Evans and Lange four illustrations each and fairly equal text space. In the past, women seemed nearly invisible in photographic criticism and theory; even the compendia of writings that appeared during the 1970s and 1980s included work by few women photographers and theorists. They are surprisingly underrepresented in the reams of critical writing about photography that took place in Europe during the 1920s and early 1930s, although as the German photojournalist Ilse Bing noted, "many women participated in the creation of modern photography." Particularly in Europe, the inaccessibility of their writings and of much of their work made it difficult until fairly recently to even begin to evaluate the extent and quality of women's contributions to the modernist era. In terms of collecting and exhibiting by women, the record at the Museum of Modern Art is revealing and fairly typical. In 1940 this institution became the first major art museum in the United States (as differentiated from those specializing in historical materials) to set up a photography department; a half century or so later 72 women were represented among a total of 1,226 individuals--not quite 6 percent. Writing in 1973 in Looking at Photographs (in which 13 of the 100 examples from MoMA's collection are by women), John Szarkowski commended himself on this representation, claiming that it was "surely larger than that of women among those seriously committed to photography." This despite the fact that almost as many women as men were graduating from art and professional schools with advanced degrees in photography and that photography-industry statistics counted almost as many women camera users as men. MoMA's exhibition record has been brighter: of the seventy one-person photography shows held there between 1943 and 1990, 28 percent of their acquisitions and purchases, and women have been given half as many one-person exhibitions as men. The effects of similar imbalances in acquisitions and exhibitions at other museums were reflected in the commercial market, which had expanded substantially by 1990. One result of museum's preference for work by male photographers was that private collectors were more eager to collect men's work. Prices, too, were inequitable: on average, work by men yielded about 50 to 60 percent more than that by women. Since 1996 this has changed, and prices appear to have equalized, in part because of the active market for "art" photographs and in part because of greater awareness of photography by women. Prices now seem to relate more to the quality and scarcity of an individual image than to any other factor. Mention should also be made of collections of women's work that have been made during the past two decades and of the archive started by Peter Palmquist, which now comprises nearly eleven thousand examples of work by women photographers. Excerpted from A History of Women Photographers All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

When Rosenblum's chronicle made its debut in 1994, Publishers Weekly anointed it a "landmark volume"; it's easy to see why. The text digs back to photography's beginnings in the glass negative days of the 1800s through the current megapixel age. For this third edition, 20 new female shooters and ten images have been added. In total, this sports more than 300 pix by over 270 photographers. Subjects run the gamut from still life, portraits, and press to artsy stuff-basically everything. The imagery is reproduced beautifully. Informative and wonderfully illustrated, this stunner could do double duty in art and women's history collections.-Michael Rogers, "Classic Returns," BookSmack! 7/1/2010 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

In this landmark volume, Rosenblum (A World History of Photography) examines sympathetically the achievements of women in photography since its invention in 1839, and highlights society's failure to give them appropriate recognition. One research obstacle the author encountered was the 19th-century practice of men taking credit for work done by women. Here is work from 250 female camera artists, from Julia Margaret Cameron (b. 1815) to Annie Leibovitz (b. 1949), who, despite strong cultural resistance, mastered everything from early wet-plate views and portraits to 35 millimeter photojournalism, often initiating aesthetic and commercial improvements. Her chronicle of women's part in each era's artistic movements and media transitions, plus capsule biographies with an in-depth bibliography and index, make this a seminal reference work. The author's choice of 263 photographs seems to favor the esoteric, bringing to light a largely unknown world in vivid originality and broad archival conception. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

The third edition of this once pioneering book (2nd ed., 2000; 1st ed., CH, Jul'95, 32-6047) has been revised and enlarged from the second edition, providing additional discussion of some recent photographers, though the birth date cutoff for inclusion for most photographers remains pre-1950. A brief afterword focuses on non-Western photographers, a topic not dealt with elsewhere. Additions to the text are minor in relation to the previous edition and occur mainly in the later chapters, where extended periods are discussed. Even their inclusion points to research yet to be done. In some respects, the book has served its purpose in the earlier editions, explicating independent scholar Rosenblum's strong point of view concerning the lack of recognition of women in the field. This is a claim that hardly seems relevant today, especially in terms of the countries that are her main focus and the body of literature available now. For libraries not having the second edition, this third edition best serves Rosenblum's intent to clarify the medium's history into the last quarter of the 20th century. Notes, bibliography, and excellent artists' biographies. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty/researchers; general readers. P. C. Bunnell emeritus, Princeton University