Edited with text by Andrea Nelson. Foreword by Kaywin Feldman. Preface by Andrea Nelson & Mia Fineman. Text by Elizabeth Cronin, Mila Ganeva, Kristen Gresh, Elizabeth Otto, Kim Sichel.
An in-depth look at the many ways women around the world helped shape modern photography from the 1920s to the 1950s as they captured images of a radically changing world
During the 1920s the New Woman was easy to recognize but hard to define. Hair bobbed and fashionably dressed, this iconic figure of modernity was everywhere, splashed across magazine pages or projected on the silver screen. A global phenomenon, she embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art—including photography.
This groundbreaking, richly illustrated book looks at those “new women” who embraced the camera as a mode of expression and made a profound impact on the medium from the 1920s to the 1950s. Thematic chapters explore how women emerged as a driving force in modern photography, bringing their own perspective to artistic experimentation, studio portraiture, fashion and advertising work, scenes of urban life, ethnography and photojournalism.
Featuring work by 120 photographers, this volume expands the history of photography by critically examining an international array of canonical and less well-known women photographers, from Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange and Lola Álvarez Bravo to Germaine Krull, Tsuneko Sasamoto and Homai Vyarawalla. Against the odds, these women produced invaluable visual testimony that reflects both their personal experiences and the extraordinary social and political transformations of the era.
Ilse Bing, "Selbstporträt mit Leica (Self-Portrait with Leica)," 1931, gelatin silver print, 26.7 × 30.5 cm (10 1/2 × 12 in.), Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. From 'The New Woman Behind the Camera.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
S Magazine
David Saric
This collection of photography illustrates the notion of the “New Woman”—with her hair bobbed and a desirable sartorial flair—and how she infiltrated the world of experimental picture making, studio portraiture, photojournalism, and other means of image making in the 1920s-50s. A bevy of female photographers are featured, both well-known and not.
L'Oeil de la Photographie
Editors
This book looks at those diverse “new women” who embraced the camera as a mode of expression and made a profound impact on the medium from the 1920s to the 1950s. Thematic chapters explore how women emerged as a driving force in modern photography, bringing multiple perspectives to artistic experimentation, studio portraiture, fashion and advertising work, scenes of urban life, ethnography, and photojournalism.
Musee
Dani Martin
[The New Woman Behind the Camera] poses important, and often nuanced, questions alongside some of the most influential and inspiring early works of female photographers.
ARLIS/NA Reviews
Beverly Mitchell
The overall landscape of this catalog with its global focus, large and plentiful photographs, and an index of short biographies of many, but not all, of the photographers in the exhibition, yields an excellent reference text. While monographs on several of these photographers exist, the cumulative approach of Nelson and the other authors’ research as instantiations of the New Woman phenomenon gives this subject the air of fresh territory.
New Yorker
Andrea K. Scott
In the first half of the twentieth century, female photographers emerged as a powerful force[...]Pictures by some hundred and twenty photographers from more than twenty countries are on view.
Air Mail
Julia Vitale
Despite their groundbreaking achievements in the 20th century, female architects still struggle to receive recognition in a male-dominated field. Spotlighting 36 contemporary women architects and some of their most impressive buildings, Women in Architecture, a new book from Hatje Cantz, shows the world what it may have missed.
CBS: News
Women photographers and their work celebrated in an alternate history of photography.
New York Times
Blake Gopnik
For centuries before they went New, women had been objectified and observed as few men were likely to be. Picking up the camera didn’t pull eyes away from a New Woman; it could put her all the more clearly on view. But thanks to photography, she could begin to look back, with power, at the world around her.
Financial Times
Ariella Budick
A quietly indignant survey of 20th-century female photographers around the globe. Ambitious but far from definitive, the show is an opening salvo in the effort to restore a history riddled with omissions.
Hyperallergic
Julia Curl
Unearths quite a bit of buried treasure.
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This unaccredited photograph of Tsuneko Sasamoto, Japan's first female photojournalist, in Tokyo, 1940, is reproduced from The New Woman Behind the Camera, published to accompany the exhibition of game-changing international female photographers, 1920–1950, opening this week at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In her short biography of the artist at the end of the book, Kara Felt writes: "Discouraged by her family from studying painting, Sasamoto shifted to illustration and sewing-pattern design. In 1940 she met Kenichi Hayashi, head of the photo agency Japan Photo Library. Inspired by magazine illustrations she saw in Hayashi’s office and the prospect of becoming Japan’s first female photojournalist, Sasamoto accepted his offer to join the agency. Over the next year she photographed envoys, including members of the Hitler-Jugend (Hitler Youth), as well as schools, festivals, children, and young women learning farming techniques. After the war, Sasamoto worked for the Tokyo newspaper Fujin Minshu Shimbunsha. By 1947 she was undertaking magazine commissions and her own projects, such as picturing the imperial prince. Sasamoto photographed fashion and recorded the aftermath of the war, including the US occupation of Japan. In 1950 she became a charter member of the Nihon Shashinka Kyōkai (Japan Professional Photographers Society). She gained renown for her portraits, whose subjects ranged from artists and writers to the wives of striking coal miners. By the late 1960s Sasamoto had stopped photographing. She resumed at age 71, when she revisited her series on remarkable women born during the Meiji and early Showa eras.”
Photographer unknown, "Tsuneko Sasamoto, Tokyo" (1940), inkjet print, printed 2020, 18.2 x 18.2 cm (7 3/16 x 7 3/16 in.), Tsuneko Sasamoto / Japan Professional Photographers Society.
This March 1942 photo by Dorothea Lange, titled “Japanese-American owned grocery store,” is reproduced from The New Woman Behind the Camera, published to accompany a major exhibition looking at the many ways midcentury women helped shape Modern photography around the world, on view now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In her introduction, National Gallery of Art curator Andrea Nelson writes, “Lange was aware of and concerned about the roundup of Japanese citizens after the bombing of Pearl Harbor that prompted the United States to enter World War II, but she was, according to photo historian Beverly Brannan, ‘unprepared for how strongly she would react to the racial and civil rights issues posed by the internment.’ Lange’s opposition to the policy was subtly but undeniably expressed in her photographs, causing many of them to be ‘impounded,’ designated out of line with the government’s purposes.”
Dorothea Lange, "Japanese-American owned grocery store, Oakland, California, March 1942," gelatin silver print, 19 x 24.5 cm (7 x 9 5/8 in.), National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser.
Today, we congratulate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, forty-sixth President and Vice President of the United States! It's an historic day for so many reasons—one that comes honestly, through the herculean efforts not only of the millions of voters and advocates who braved shocking hostility and the threat of sickness or other physical harm, or the men and women of Congress who oversaw the process, or the judges who ruled on its legality. This day is historic in particular because it is the day that America inaugurates its first woman Vice President—who is also our first Vice President of Black or South Asian descent. In honor of the highest-ranking female elected official in American history, we are pleased to feature this 1931 collage by ringl + pit from The New Woman Behind the Camera.
ringl + pit (Grete Stern, Ellen Auerbach), foldout collage of gelatin silver photographs, twisted string, transparent and opaque watercolor, pen and black ink, with graphite underdrawing, from Die Ringlpitis, 1931, bound volume, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund.
Russian photojournalist Galina Sanko's iconic 1943 combat photograph, "During the Attack," is reproduced from The New Woman Behind the Camera, one of our top 2020 Holiday Gift suggestions for photo lovers, published in advance of a major 2021 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. One of only a few women who served as war correspondents during World War II, Sanko covered the Eastern Front, photographing battles in Kursk, Moscow and Stalingrad, as well as the Siege of Leningrad in 1944. "Sanko also photographed war’s impact on people and the landscape," Kara Felt writes in the rich Biography section of the book. "Her images show soldiers conversing with one another and writing letters home, dead and wounded combatants, grief-stricken mothers, displaced civilians returning home, farmers praying for their dead, and children at Petrozavodsk—a camp in which Russians were interned by the Finns. Taken at close range, Sanko’s war pictures capture the brutality of armed conflict."
ABOVE: Galina Sanko, "During an Attack," 1943, gelatin silver print, printed c. 1960s, 15.7 × 24.3 cm (6 3/16 × 9 9/16 in.), Robert Koch Gallery
This 1921 portrait of Austrian-Argentine painter Mariette Pachhofer (later Mariette Lydis), by the pioneering Austrian society photographer Madame d'Ora, is reproduced from The New Woman Behind the Camera, published to accompany the enlightening exhibition currently on view at The Met, en route to the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., in the Fall. Featuring work by 120 photographers, including well-known figures like Berenice Abbott, Claude Cahun, Dorothea Lange and Lee Miller, as well as names that will be new to many, this volume is, from beginning to end, a revelation. Down-and-dirty war reportage, documentary, avant-garde abstraction, experimental portraiture, and a whole new way of dealing with fashion meet with all sorts of new international ideas about gender, power and artistic license.
ABOVE: Madame d'Ora, "Mariette Pachhofer (later Mariette Lydis)," 1921, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund and the R. K. Mellon Family Foundation.
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.75 x 11.75 in. / 288 pgs / 8 color / 269 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $60.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $84 GBP £48.00 ISBN: 9781942884743 PUBLISHER: National Gallery of Art AVAILABLE: 11/10/2020 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by National Gallery of Art. Edited with text by Andrea Nelson. Foreword by Kaywin Feldman. Preface by Andrea Nelson & Mia Fineman. Text by Elizabeth Cronin, Mila Ganeva, Kristen Gresh, Elizabeth Otto, Kim Sichel.
An in-depth look at the many ways women around the world helped shape modern photography from the 1920s to the 1950s as they captured images of a radically changing world
During the 1920s the New Woman was easy to recognize but hard to define. Hair bobbed and fashionably dressed, this iconic figure of modernity was everywhere, splashed across magazine pages or projected on the silver screen. A global phenomenon, she embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art—including photography.
This groundbreaking, richly illustrated book looks at those “new women” who embraced the camera as a mode of expression and made a profound impact on the medium from the 1920s to the 1950s. Thematic chapters explore how women emerged as a driving force in modern photography, bringing their own perspective to artistic experimentation, studio portraiture, fashion and advertising work, scenes of urban life, ethnography and photojournalism.
Featuring work by 120 photographers, this volume expands the history of photography by critically examining an international array of canonical and less well-known women photographers, from Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange and Lola Álvarez Bravo to Germaine Krull, Tsuneko Sasamoto and Homai Vyarawalla. Against the odds, these women produced invaluable visual testimony that reflects both their personal experiences and the extraordinary social and political transformations of the era.
