Overview

Women’s Camera Work explores how photographs have been and are used to construct versions of history and examines how photographic representations of otherness often tell stories about the self. In the process, Judith Fryer Davidov focuses on the lives and work of a particular network of artists linked by time, interaction, influence, and friendship-one that included Gertrude KÄsebier, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, and Laura Gilpin. Women’s Camera Work ranges from American women’s photographic practices during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to a study of landscape photography. Using contemporary cultural studies discourse to critique influential male-centered historiography and the male-dominated art world, Davidov exhibits the work of these women; tells their absorbing stories; and discusses representations of North American Indians, African Americans, Asian Americans, and the migrant poor. Evaluating these photographers’ distinct contributions to constructions of Americanness and otherness, she helps us to discover the power of reading images closely, and to learn to see through these women’s eyes.In presenting one of the most important strands of American photography, this richly illustrated book will interest students of American visual culture, women’s studies, and general readers alike.

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9780822320678

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Reviews

Dorothea Lange's renowned Migrant Mother is the point of departure for this generously illustrated and intelligently argued book ... The major contribution however is its gathering and juxtaposing of the work of a number of more or less well-known women photographers...Davidov presents them as a loose network rather than a movement and, in here close readings, attends to what is unique in their work as well as what they might have in common... Clearly packed with information of interest to students of photography and, indeed, of twentieth-century American culture. --American Studies, Vol. 34, 2000 If photographs are artifacts with a continuing life, Judith Fryer Davidov provides an acute reading of the ways in which the camera work of key female photographers construct histories that rethink linear models of male photographic influence, and that negotiate and represent otherness... The success of Women's Camera Work is, indeed, the scrupulous and sensitive consideration of the lives of both the photographer (as text) and the photographer (as practitioner) in a culture that has often marginalized both. --Journal of American Studies, Vol 33, 1999

Author Information

Judith Fryer Davidov is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is the author of The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel and Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Constructions of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather.

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