Pioneers to Professionals

The earliest known woman photographer and the first person to make a photo book, Anna Atkins was a pivotal figure of photography and botany in Britain. During the 1840s and 1850s, she produced several extensive series of “photographical impressions” (photograms) using the cyanotype process, a camera-less process in which objects are placed onto a sensitized sheet of paper and exposed to light. The unexposed areas under the object remain white, while the areas hit by the light turn a distinct Prussian blue. Delicate and precise, Atkins’s photograms were meant to function primarily as scientific records categorizing the natural world, and in this case, the global reach of the British empire (Mauritius was a colony at the time).

Julia Margaret Cameron took up photography in 1863 at the age of forty-eight, after her son and daughter-in-law gave her a camera, saying, “It may amuse you, Mother, to try photography.” Within a few years, Cameron mastered the tricky wet-collodion process and startled the world of Victorian photography with her tender portraits and unprecedented theatrical compositions, many inspired by literature. Her works prominently feature women and possess a translucent, soft-focus quality that confounded contemporary critics accustomed to more detailed, precise images. Today Cameron’s photographs are lauded for their alluring beauty and their ability to suggest the subjects’ interior experiences. Her daughter-in-law, Annie Chinery Cameron, seen here, was a frequent subject.

Edith H. DeLong was a prominent member of the New York Camera Club and an advocate for the arts. This delicate portrait was the cover of The Photographic Times in 1894 and garnered praise: “Most of our readers will be familiar with this lady’s excellent photographs. . . . There are many points in the arrangement and lighting of the model . . . which will be well for the photographer, both amateur and professional, to study.” Despite this recognition, her name is not found easily in photography’s history and was not even in the High’s database last year. The print had been miscredited, attributed to her husband, and misspelled—which exemplifies how easily women’s histories can disappear due to name changes, errors, and formal conventions.

Anne Brigman was a trailblazing photographer who took up photography as a hobby in 1901. Within a handful of years, she had established herself as a leading member of the Photo-Secessionist movement, which championed photography as a fine art and embraced highly manipulated, “painterly” photographs. Brigman’s exaltation of the nude female body in harmony with nature exemplified the growing bohemian spirit on the West Coast at the dawn of the twentieth century. Like much of Brigman’s work, this view is artfully staged and echoes the modern dance aesthetics of her contemporary, Isadora Duncan. Brigman was an outspoken champion of women’s empowerment, sharing her views on the importance of female independence in a 1913 article titled “Fear Retards Woman.”

Margaret Bourke-White achieved many firsts. Hired by Henry Luce in 1929, she was the first staff photographer for his Fortune magazine. She produced the cover for the inaugural edition of LIFE, as its first female photographer, in 1936. As a correspondent during World War II, she captured the German invasion of Moscow in 1941, was the first woman to accompany Air Corps crews on bombing missions in 1942, and documented the liberation of the German concentration camps in 1945. This photograph of drying newsprint, made for a Price Brothers Paper publicity campaign, epitomizes her signature style: a precise, industrial, formally harmonious aesthetic that captured the spirit of the “machine age.”

The daughter of designer Lucian Bernhard, Ruth Bernhard studied art in Berlin and worked in a commercial photography studio before moving to New York in 1927. There, she served as a darkroom assistant to Ralph Steiner and quickly established herself in Greenwich Village’s vibrant lesbian community, where she became close friends with photographer Berenice Abbott and her partner Elizabeth McCausland. Although she is best known for her abstract still lifes and sensual female nudes, Bernhard also worked for many leading architects and industrial designers, including the Austrian-born Frederick Kiesler, whose remarkable New York Film Guild building is pictured here.

Alma Lavenson, who first learned photography by watching a technician develop pictures at the local drugstore, is recognized as one of the leading West Coast photographers of the 1920s and 1930s. Along with her mentor Imogen Cunningham, she was a founding member of Ansel Adams’s influential Group f/64, a movement that embraced a straight, unmanipulated approach to photography. This dizzying view of a ship’s prow, with its dynamic lines and patterning of light and ropes, epitomizes Lavenson’s distinctively modern approach to form and subject matter.

Ilse Bing received her first camera as a teenager and continued to explore the medium as a complement to her doctoral studies in art history. By 1929, she decided to pursue photography professionally and moved from Frankfurt to Paris, where she quickly established herself as a leading photojournalist. A highly experimental printer, she was also among the earliest photographers to adopt the newly introduced 35 mm Leica camera, whose small size and fast shutter allowed her to experiment boldly with angles, cropping, and movement. Bing made numerous self-portraits, including this famous rendering of herself in mirrors, a complex and dazzling image that shows her with her revered Leica. As she later put it, “I felt the camera grew as an extension of my eyes and moved with me.” After the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, Bing emigrated to New York but struggled to establish herself professionally. By 1959 she had stopped making work altogether, and it was not until decades later that her extraordinary talent was recognized and her work entered museums around the world.

A 1921 visit to esteemed photographer Anne Brigman inspired Louise Dahl-Wolfe, who had graduated from art school, to start making photographic nudes and self-portraits. By 1930, she had established a professional career as a photographer working for a variety of magazines, and in 1936, she became the first female staff photographer at Harper’s Bazaar, where she was celebrated for her fresh, innovative pictures that showed women as strong, confident, and independent. Along with her colleagues, editor in chief Carmel Snow and fashion editor Diana Vreeland, Dahl-Wolfe represented a powerful new female voice in fashion.

Dorothy Norman was a prominent photographer, writer, editor, social activist, supporter of humanitarian and women’s causes, and arts patron. Her work has often been relegated to the sidelines of photographic history, as she is better known for her affair with her mentor, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, than for her contributions to photography. These include a rich selection of witty, probing portraits of friends and prominent cultural figures and a smaller, lesser-known body of photographic studies including intimate still lifes, landscapes, and architectural views. She was also editor of an important arts journal and author of numerous books on art and photography.