Women Seeing Women

A Pictorial History of Women’s Photography from Julia Margaret Cameron to Annie Leibovitz
By Lothar Schirmer (editor) Elisabeth Bronfen (essay)

‘These often stunning portraits by women photographers probe beyond the skin-deep.  There are some well-known pictures here – Giselle Freund’s haunting portrait of Virginia Woolf shortly before her death, Eve Arnold’s shot of a skimpily dressed Marily Monroe reading James Joyce’s Ulysses…’

“ Books for Christmas’, Daily Mail - 21 December 2007

To read a feature on Women Seeing Women from the

The Sunday Telegragh click here

The title Women Seeing Women implies not only a conventional representation of femininity but also one of familiarity. These photographs, covering the four major themes - social commentary, the family, the female body and virtual reality - depict, among others, the worlds of art, literature, fashion, dance and show business. Viewing these images in succession - from the late 19th century, with photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron and Clementina, Lady Hawarden, to 100 years later at the turn of the 21st, with images by Annie Leibovitz, Sally Mann and Ellen von Unwerth - we are left pondering whether there is such a thing as a ‘female eye’ in photography, whether women photographers see women differently from their male counterparts, and how our perception changes when we know a photograph to have been taken by a woman.

The 160 photographs collected here display an incremental assertion of self-definition and experimentation; the undimmed power of the body; renderings of female authority and vulnerability; expressions of sympathy and proclamations of strength. Many of the photographs exhibit a sense of shared familiarity, trust, a trace of dialogue and an abandonment of imposed femininity, suggesting that women photographers are able to recognize what is particular and singular about women. And so these images, from the most alluring and seductive to the harrowingly destitute, are not simply testaments to the presence of the model, but also to the attitude, posture and gaze of the photographer herself.