Women Looking at Women

Charmian Reading was a photographer for the Medical Committee for Human Rights, formed in 1964 to support the Mississippi voter registration campaign and to provide public health services in rural areas with limited or no access. Here, she portrays Fannie Lou Hamer, the youngest of twenty children in a family of sharecroppers, who came to prominence during the 1964 Democratic Convention as the leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the all-White regular delegation. Here, Hamer leads a round of “We Shall Overcome,” the closing anthem at most movement gatherings.

Born in Germany, Marion Palfi worked as a freelance photographer and portraitist in Berlin before fleeing the Nazis in 1936, eventually marrying an American soldier and emigrating to the United States. Settling in New York, she befriended Harlem Renaissance writers Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps and soon began to photograph for numerous Black publications and causes. In the late 1940s, she documented the virulent effects of racism and poverty in the United States and published a devastating study on racial violence in Georgia that includes this portrait of the widow of Caleb Hill, the victim of the first reported lynching of 1949.

Kael Alford is a photojournalist who has covered culture, politics, and conflict in the Balkans and the Middle East. Her work documenting the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 shows the impact of the war on Iraqi citizens who live amidst the daily threat and effects of violence. Working unembedded, rather than traveling with the US military, allowed her freedom to move around the country and connect with civilians, though it also placed her in more precarious positions with less logistical support. University students, seen here, fear being singled out by radical militia groups who have threatened women for attending university or for appearing in public without covering their heads.

Before Anne Noggle returned to school in her forties to study photography, she was an aviator and military pilot who flew during World War II and the Korean War and achieved the rank of captain in the US Air Force. Her photographs explore women, sexuality, identity, and the aging process. She once noted that faces are “empty until they reach their 40s. Then they become photographable.” In this work, she captures her one-time partner, Nancy, wearing a male friend’s suit, her face cast half in shadow and gazing warily at the camera.

Called by a New York Times critic “the most famous unknown photographer in America,” Evelyn Hofer explored the relationships between people and their environment in a series of photo books devoted to various cities in Europe and America. She was especially noted for her keen ability to capture her sitters’ bearing, expression, and dress in a way that revealed the subtle imprint of class, labor, and place on them. This work, made for her 1962 book London Perceived, shows a mature waitress standing proudly but with a certain tentativeness behind her beautifully set table in London’s oldest “gentlemen’s club,” which remains exclusively male today.

Lola Álvarez Bravo began photographing while assisting her husband, photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, in his studio. After they separated, she committed to photography as a career and drew her subject matter from her surroundings, casting a compassionate lens on the people of Mexico, including the impoverished and those living in the margins of society. She was fast friends with legendary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and often photographed her; her gallery was also the first and only space to host an exhibition of Kahlo’s work in Mexico during her lifetime.

Sylvia Plachy was born in Budapest, Hungary, and was smuggled out in 1956 after the collapse of the Hungarian revolution. Settling in New York in 1958, she began photographing in 1964 and over the next forty years established herself as a preeminent photojournalist. Her work sensitively portrays the emotional complexity of her subjects, empathetically capturing their inner experiences through the expressivity of their faces and gestures. As her close friend, mentor, and fellow photographer André Kertész commented, “I have never seen the moment sensed and caught on film with more intimacy and humanity.”

Throughout her career, photographer Diane Arbus focused her unsparing gaze on the unusual and eccentric. Sometimes these qualities were overtly visible in her subjects; more often she used her camera to ferret out the bizarre, strange, and occasionally violent currents beneath the placid veneer of postwar American life. Of this picture, she recounted, “They are a fascinating family. I think all families are creepy in a way.” The caption that accompanies this work, which shows only one of the couple’s three children, exudes a sense of disconnection, fantasy, and oblique grief: “The parents seem to be dreaming the child and the child seems to be inventing them.”

In Joni Sternbach’s Surfland series, what began as an attempt to capture the movement of waves became a documentation of surf culture. She was especially drawn to women surfers, such as the couple here, who run counter to masculine stereotypes around surfing. To make this photo, Sternbach employed the tintype process, which requires pouring chemicals onto a metal plate and then exposing and developing it on the spot, the perfect complement to her chosen subject matter. The swirling liquid chemicals echo the movement of the waves and the interplay between surfers and the water.

Doris Ulmann began her photographic career while attending the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York—the first art photography school in the United States. There she worked in the Pictorialist tradition, which included embracing the “painterly” qualities of soft focus and manipulating surfaces. After undergoing a major surgery, Ulmann decided to pursue her interest in people “for whom life had not been a dance.” She began traveling throughout the southeastern United States documenting the folk traditions and people of the Appalachian Mountains. She made several sun-dappled portraits of this young girl (identified on other prints as “Kreiger girl”) in and around Berea, Kentucky.

Sally Mann is renowned for her work exploring the beauty and complexities of family, motherhood, memory, and the history of the American South. From 1985 to 1994, Mann photographed the coming of age of her three children: Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia. One of the first photographers to explore in depth the psyche and drama of adolescence, Mann’s series, Immediate Family, is an intimate portrait of childhood through the tender eye of a mother. Although the children often directly confront the camera in the series, Sunday Funnies depicts a quiet scene when the children may not even realize their private moment is being lovingly captured.

Born into the first postwar generation in Japan, Madoka Takagi graduated from art school with a focus on printmaking and soon turned to photography. Her fascination with the material aspects of printmaking is evident in the delicate, silvery platinum prints she made by brushing paper with a solution of platinum-based light-sensitive salts. This double portrait is part of an extensive series of self-portraits she staged with friends and acquaintances in New York, where she was ensconced within a vibrant and eclectic 1980s art scene.

This double-sided piece is from Jill Frank’s series everyone who woke up at the yellow house, which she created one morning following a house party in Athens, Georgia. The two portraits of this young woman were taken moments apart, and it is in that instantaneous change of expression that Frank captures the fluidity of personal identity and emotion intrinsic to adolescence. Frank’s formal portraiture lends a seriousness to this chapter of life and the social rituals that accompany it. Rather than representing adolescence as a frivolous phase, she allows it to exist on its own terms and merit.

One of the most important photographers of her generation, Nan Goldin is an artist whose personal life is at the center of her art. Her Cookie Portfolio documents her intimate friendship with Cookie Mueller. In the top photograph, we see Cookie dancing jubilantly with her friend and lover Sharon. The bottom photograph, made thirteen years later, strikes a far more somber note as we see Sharon sitting at the front of the bed, disconnected from a frail-appearing Cookie, who lies underneath her wedding picture. Cookie’s husband, Vittorio, died from AIDS the month this picture was made, and Cookie would die two months later. Despite the palpable loss sensed in the distance between these two works, Goldin conveys the steadfastness and tenderness of female friendship and support, which also infused her process: “I’m looking with a warm eye, not a cold eye. I’m not analyzing what’s going on—I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.”