Are Women Photographers As Talented As Male Photographers? An Exhibition In Florida Argues The Obvious

Towards the end of Can You Forgive Her, a novel written by Anthony Trollope and published in 1865, one of the main characters, while on a tour of Europe, notes that there were a hundred and fifty thousand “female operatives” employed in Paris — a fact that the main female character is “glad to find.” In contemporary discussions about the role of women in the workplace, the fact that women have been working in professional fields for most of modern history is largely obscured. The truth is, women, and especially lower class women, have always worked.

Another truth remains just as irrefutable, and that is that women’s professional work has never been equally valued. Even in 2022 in the United States, women are still only paid only 83 cents for every dollar a man earns. This, in part, may explain why, despite the fact that women earn 65-75% of the masters in fine art degrees, they only make up 46% of working artists. To make great art, you need talent and discipline, of course. But even more, you need access to funds, which in turn give you time. Time and funds have been sorely lacking to most women until very recently, and this can account for some of the reason why there are not more celebrated female artists from the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Because even if they weren’t rising to the top of the canon, women were making great art in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, as the exhibition “Women’s Work” at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) St. Petersburg so adeptly points out. Open through September 11, the exhibition, which highlights fifty photographs taken starting in the year 1865, visually makes the argument that while the world was looking elsewhere, women were behind the lens of cameras. In fact, photography was considered an acceptable profession for women to pursue. “Women were seen as very accommodating and could put children at ease [in studios],” says Dr. Jane L. Aspinwall, the curator for photography at the museum. Additionally, they were seen as being uniquely talented at color tinting daguerrotypes. “Women were also seen to excel these very meticulous and detail oriented tasks,” she adds.

In terms of honing their craft, many women were never given the opportunity. “Women were really mandated to just taking care of the home and children and even super talented female photographers like Julia Margaret Cameron and Gertrude Käsebier didn’t come to photography until they were in their late forties after they had raised their families,” says Aspinwall. “A lot of really talented women just were never recognized because they were never able to achieve their potential, and they weren’t encouraged.”

Aspinwall adds: “The talent was there. The motivation was there. Just the support was not.”

The exhibition draws entirely from the museum’s permanent collection, which has a particularly strong body of photographs by women. This, Aspinwall notes, is largely due to the fact that soon after its founding in 1969, the museum hired an assistant director who assiduously collected photographs by women. Even Aspinwall herself, who recently joined the museum staff, was surprised at the wide range of women photographers represented in the collection. “Most institutions are trying to broaden the canon and look at underrepresented groups, including women,” Aspinwall says. “The MFA St. Petersburg is part of that movement, too.”

The exhibition is arranged chronologically, and starts with an 1865 image by Julia Margaret Cameron, who took fey, whimsical portraits of women and children in poses redolent of nymphs and fairies. The exhibition unfolds from there, showing how women were creating work that was both informed and completely unique from the art movements of their time. For example, Illse Bing’s image Chairs (1931), which depicts wire chairs on a rainy promenade, seemingly respond to Eugene Atget’s urban landscapes. And Imogen Cunningham’s Water Hyacinth 2 (c. 1925) clearly converses with Man Ray’s erotic still life. But other photographs, including Käsebier’s Happy Days, 1902, which depicts happy children playing in a field, and Marion Post Wolcott’s Picnic on Running Board (1941), which depicts a beachside picnic in the midst of World War II, depict environments that would have been largely occluded from the male gaze, and were likely disdained by them.

How different would women’s place in history be if, in the last two centuries, women photographers were given equal prominence to male ones? The exhibition can’t answer that question but if Ruth Bernhard’s Classic Torso (1952), which shows a nude female cradling herself, is any indication, it would be both similar and very different. In the photograph, it’s the anonymous woman’s strong legs and muscular sinews we notice more than her sexual reproduction organs. We can’t go back and give women the time and space to make great art. But we can but we can change the roadmap for the future starting with exhibitions like “Women’s Work,” which reinforces, more than anything, that women have always, and will always have, equal talent to their male counterparts.