Hello, I’m Mia Fineman.
Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Met.
The new woman of the 1920s was easy to recognize
but hard to define.
Her hair was bobbed.
Her dress chic.
This figure was everywhere.
On the pages of magazines and on the silver screen.
Embodied by celebrities like Louise Brooks
or Josephine Baker.
She was modern, independent, stylish, creative,
and confident.
The feminist ideal of the new woman emerged at the end
of the 19th century and spread globally
during the first half of the 20th century.
Now the figure of the new woman meant different things
in different parts of the world.
But what they all had in common was a desire
for independence,
for self-determination,
and freedom to pursue a professional life beyond
that of wife and mother.
This exhibition highlights the diverse new women
who took up the camera and made significant advances
in a number of different genres,
avant-garde experimentation, and commercial studio practice.
They did social documentary
and photojournalism.
Some of them did ethnography projects
as well as the photography of sports, dance, and fashion.
Women had always participated in photography
throughout the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.
But it wasn’t until the 1920s, after World War I
that they really entered the field in force.
This was due to a variety of factors.
The rise of mass communications, better access to training,
and increasing acceptance of women in the workplace.
For women during this period, the camera
was really a means of independence and self-determination.
It allowed them to create images from their own perspective
and it also allowed them to create a source of income
to support themselves financially.
The exhibition explores the period from the 1920s
through the 1950s.
This period was not only important culturally
for the rise of women’s rights
and women’s participation in public life.
It was also the era of modern photography,
when artistic photography
and photojournalism really flourished.
What makes this exhibition new and groundbreaking
is that it looks at this period in a global context.
The ultimate aim of the show is not merely
to insert new names into the canon,
but to complicate and enrich our understanding of modernity.
The show offers a more inclusive version
of the history of photography.
It’s a version that’s more nuanced
and hopefully will be more inspiring to future generations.
As Oscar Wilde once said,
”The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
This is a self-portrait by the photographer Germaine Krull,
made around 1925.
Now, most portraits show you the subject’s facial features,
their expression, maybe some details of their clothing,
and their pose.
But here, the camera is foregrounded.
It’s a radical new way of thinking about a self-portrait.
Instead of showing what she looks like,
it shows us what she does.
It shows us her vocation.
The picture also focuses on her hands
and the lit cigarette between her fingers.
Now, during this period, smoking was a symbol
of liberation for women.
It was considered to be a masculine
and sometimes dirty and unhealthy habit.
And women were not supposed to do it.
So, there’s another way that she’s depicting herself
as a modern woman who is going to break
through boundaries and limitations.
This portrait of the Japanese photographer,
Tsuneko Sasamoto, shows her at work
holding the camera up to her face
and she is really the embodiment of a modern new woman.
We see her from a low angle in front of the sleek facade
of an international style building.
She is dressed in western clothes
at a time when many women in Japan
were still wearing traditional kimono.
Ironically, she later said that one
of the most difficult obstacles she confronted as a photographer,
was that she was required to wear skirts
and high heels when she worked.
Sasamoto began working as a freelance photographer
in Tokyo after World War II and went on
to become one of Japan’s first female photojournalists
at a time when the field was completely male-dominated.
Here we see a busy street scene in a corner of Tokyo.
In the background is a post exchange or P.X.
which provided goods to US troops
and came to symbolize the American influence
in Japan after World War II.
We also see a young woman dressed in western clothes,
which were becoming more popular in Japan
after the austerity of the war years.
So, it’s a picture that really encapsulates
what was happening in Japanese culture at the time.
At 106 years old, Sasamoto is the only photographer
in the exhibition who’s still living today.
In 1917, Lucy Schwab assumed the gender ambiguous name
Claude Cahun and began living with Marcel Moore,
born Suzanne Malherbe.
The couple collaborated extensively,
including on a series of photographic self-portraits
in which Cahun assumed various identities,
using costumes, props, and makeup.
Much like Cindy Sherman did half a century later.
This work is so radical because it suggests
that gender itself is a performance, a form of masquerade.
That our identities aren’t fixed or stable
but constructed, in part,
through the images we see all around us.
In this double self-portrait,
we see two versions of the androgynous Cahun
with two very different expressions.
Neither is more real or more authentic
and that’s part of the point.
This self isn’t one thing or another.
We contain multitudes.
This is a portrait of Homai Vyarawalla.
She was one of India’s first female photojournalists.
Here we see her standing in the water at Chowpatty Beach
in Bombay.
She’s wearing western clothing and holding a camera
to her eye, ignoring everything and everyone around her.
Completely absorbed in the act of making a picture.
The image conveys a sense of professionalism,
of independence, and commitment to her craft.
I love this photograph of Bombay’s Victoria Station.
Vyarawalla is on the street.
She positions her camera low to the ground
and glimpses the station through the wheels of a rickshaw.
Reducing the dominance of this monumental symbol
of British Colonial rule.
Foregrounding the life of India,
the life of the local street with this backdrop
of British Colonialism receding into the background.
Hildegard Rosenthal was one of many European Jews
who emigrated to South America
when the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s.
She settled in São Paulo, Brazil
where she made some 3,000 images of the city
as it transformed into a modern urban center.
There’s so much going on in this photograph
of a busy street corner in central São Paulo.
There are three businessmen in suits chatting
on the right side of the frame.
In the center is a food seller’s cart
that creates a wonderful frame within a frame.
It seems like an all male scene
but if you look in the center of the picture,
you can see a young woman
who is eating a slice of watermelon
and looking back at the camera.
This was actually Rosenthal’s assistant.
So, although this scene looks completely spontaneous,
it probably wasn’t.
It’s simultaneously spontaneous and constructed.
And that’s what’s so exciting about street photography.
There’s kind of a random play of people and vehicles.
But what the photographer does is to frame it
and to give it meaning.
Commercial studio photography was an important pathway
for many women to forge a professional career
and to earn their own income.
There’s always a play of gender and race
and cultural difference inside of a portrait studio.
But studios run by women offered a different dynamic.
Florestine Perrault Collins ran a successful portrait studio
in New Orleans that catered primarily
to black and Creole clients.
Here we see a portrait of Collins’ friend,
Mae Fuller Keller.
She is posing in a lace tiered dress, high heels,
and bobbed hair.
The personification of a modern new woman.
In contrast to the often racist images of Black Americans
that were circulating in the mass media at the time,
Keller appears relaxed, confident, and self-possessed.
An individual rather than a stereotype.
Creative formal approaches like photomontage,
unconventional cropping,
and dizzying camera angles,
came to define photography during this period.
Although they were often overshadowed
by their male partners and colleagues,
women photographers were integral
in shaping an avant-garde visual language
that promoted new ways of seeing and experiencing the world.
This is a portrait by Lucia Moholy of her husband,
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who was a teacher
at the famous Bauhaus Art School in Germany.
It’s a playful portrait in which he holds up his hands
as if to say, “Don’t take my picture!”
Although it appears spontaneous, you can see
that the framing is very careful.
His eye is framed right between his thumb and forefinger
and the focus is on his face rather than on his hand.
One of the things this portrait is about
is privileging the eye, privileging the camera eye
over the manual craft of painting.
That’s the ascendance of photography
as an avant-garde art form in the 1920s.
This period saw the rise of the printed press
and especially of fashion magazines.
The unprecedented demand for fashion
and advertising photographs between the World Wars,
provided many new employment opportunities for women.
Fashion and advertising photography provided a space
where women could experiment
with pictures intended primarily for female readership.
This is an advertisement for hair oil
by the team of Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach.
German photographers who called themselves Ringl and Pit,
after their childhood nicknames.
We see a very modern-looking mannequin,
dressed in a frumpy old nightgown
that belonged to one of the artist’s mothers.
And if you look closely,
you’ll see a real human hand peeking out of the sleeve
and holding the bottle of hair oil.
This uncanny detail calls attention to the artifice
of the advertisement, embracing but also poking fun
at the commercial image of the new woman.
Lillian Bassman was not only a photographer,
she was also a very influential art director
for the teen fashion magazine, Junior Bazaar.
As a photographer herself, she was very experimental.
She used various dark room techniques
to give her images an almost painterly look.
As in this photograph,
of a model wearing a translucent hat.
Here Bassman is playing with the ideas
of concealing and revealing,
Of fashion as a means of self expression
but also is a kind of mask to hide behind.
What’s great about the photographs collected here
is that we’re looking at images of women by women.
We see more images of strength.
We see more playfulness.
We see different ways of conceiving of the body,
of looking at the body and of representing human bodies
that have just been left out of the history of photography.
Charlotte Rudolph was a pioneering photographer of dance,
who opened her own photography studio in 1924.
This photograph is part of a series
of the German avant-garde dancer, Gret Palucca
who pioneered a style of dance
that was angular, expressionistic,
and based on improvisation.
Rudolph beautifully captures the incredible energy
and originality of her choreography.
I love the way that her muscularity is really emphasized.
Her arms and legs are bare
and she looks strong and grounded.
Very unlike the ethereal, more feminine style of ballet
that preceded this modern dance form.
Dora Kallmus, who called herself Madame d’Ora,
was the first woman to open her own photography studio
in Vienna in 1906.
This full length portrait of the painter
and illustrator, Mariette Pachhofer
famous for her lithographs celebrating lesbian
and bisexual relationships,
is an amazing representation of the new woman.
Here, she cuts a very masculine image in a trench coat,
a man’s shirt and tie, breeches, knee-high boots,
and a fedora.
It’s an expression in fashion of androgyny and liberation.
She lived her life that way and that is the representation
that she collaborated on with Madame d’Ora in the studio.
During this period, many women traveled extensively
for the first time and took photographs
that documented their experiences abroad
in Africa, China, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
While others engaged in more formal ethnographic projects.
When women were doing ethnographic projects,
they often had access to domains
that were off limits to the male counterparts,
and were often able to create intimate portraits
that male photographers would not have been able to make.
Gender may have afforded these women a special connection
to certain communities but it didn’t exempt them
from producing sometimes stereotypical views,
especially photographers from Europe
and the United States travelling to other places.
And sometimes, these views reinforced hierarchical concepts
of race and ethnocentrism.
Marjorie Content started photographing
Native American tribes of the Southwest
for the United State Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1933.
This portrait of a Taos Pueblo dancer, Adam Trujillo,
with his young son, is beautifully composed.
And shows Content’s interest
in capturing her subjects as individuals,
not only as ethnographic types or representatives.
The 1930s was a time of global economic crisis
and growing political and social unrest.
Whether they were working for government agencies
or independently, women contributed to the visual record
of the depression and the events leading up to World War II.
From images of bread lines and worker demonstrations
to forced migration and internment,
women photographers helped to expose dire conditions
and shaped what would become known
as social documentary photography.
Dorothea Lange was a renowned documentary photographer
most well known for her work
with the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s.
Following Japan’s attack
on Pearl Harbor on December 1941,
President Franklin Roosevelt
established the War Relocation Authority,
sending some 120,000 Japanese Americans
to military internment centers.
Lange was employed by this agency
to document its procedures, but she quickly found herself
at odds with the government’s actions.
Here, she photographs a large sign
on the facade a grocery store owned
by a Japanese American family in Oakland, California.
She wanted to make an accurate record
of what was happening,
including the devastating loss of homes, businesses,
and community experienced by people of Japanese descent
during this time.
Pictures like this are painfully relevant today,
when American of Asian descent are again
being attacked as a result of racism and xenophobia.
The rise of the picture press in the 1920s and 30s,
established photojournalism
as a dominant form of visual expression
during this period shaped by two World Wars.
Women photographers captured a view
of worldwide economic depression, struggles
for decolonization in Africa,
and the rise of fascism
and communism in Europe and the Soviet Union.
They often received the “soft” assignments
of photographing women and children, families,
and the home front.
But some women risked their lives close to the front lines.
Galina Sanko was a Russian photojournalist
who was trained as a nurse, a driver, and mechanic.
She was one of the only female photojournalists sent
to the front lines during World War II.
What makes this such an extraordinary war photograph
is that she’s right there at close range,
probably lying in the mud.
You can almost hear the bullets
and you see these two soldiers
sort of charging into battle.
You’re right there with them, on the front lines,
in the trenches, during this period of conflict.
The photographers featured
in The New Woman Behind the Camera produced images
that reflected both their personal experiences
and the extraordinary social and political transformations
of the early 20th century.
Together, they changed the history of photography.