Art herstory

WAM taps the Eastman House to celebrate women's rights

by Leon Nigrosh

Photography has too often been viewed as a male-dominated medium. But the truth is, almost from the very beginning,

women have been intimately involved in the field -- and not just as models. The current photo exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum showcases 48 photos, compiled from the extensive collection at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, by some of the world's best female photographers.

This exhibit was originally assembled in 1995 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment (women's suffrage). WAM curator David Acton requested this reprise to coincide with "Women 2000," celebrating the 150th anniversary of the First National Convention of Women's Rights, which was held in Worcester in 1850.

The pictures are arranged in roughly chronological order, which draws attention to changing and evolving photographic techniques, artistic temperaments, and eras. The French photographer Genviève-Elisabeth Disdéri (1817-1878) produced the earliest picture included in this exhibit around 1856. In those days, most women didn't study chemistry or any of the sciences, so she picked up the tricks of her trade from her portrait-photographer husband. Disdéri's albumen-print image of the stone ruins of St. Matthew's outside of Brest, France, is notable not just for its contrast of abandoned brickwork arches against the whitewashed columnar lighthouse, but for the simple fact that it was taken out-of-doors. Because of the heavy equipment and the wet-plate processes employed during the early days, most of the earliest photographs were made in a studio setting.

It wasn't until the 1880s when technical innovations such as flexible film and cheaper lightweight cameras that more people, and that meant more women, took up photography as a hobby or profession.

American photographer Gertrude Käsebier (1852-1934) began her career as a studio-portrait photographer, making pictures of friends and family. But she soon embraced the complex photographic technology by apprenticing herself to a chemist and began producing her own experimental works. Käsebier was an early devotee of the Photo-Sessionist movement, championed by photo luminary Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946). The Sessionists' goal was to legitimate photography as art by making photographs that were more like paintings and less like documentary representations. Her Blessed Art Thou Among Women -- an image of a young girl being presented by a woman in white -- has a dreamlike quality, with most of the details either in soft-focus or absent. To achieve this effect, Käsebier actually printed her original negative, brushed all the offending details out of the print, and then photographed the altered picture.

As you pass through the exhibit, you will recognize many of the names and even some of the photos. There's Dorothy Lange's (1895-1965) ubiquitous 1936 photo of the unfortunate migrant mother in all it's expertly posed and tightly cropped glory, and Imogen Cunningham's (1883-1976) equally over-exposed Calla lilies. Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1950) is represented, not by her dramatic 1941 picture of Moscow under air attack at night, but by an obscure semi-abstract image of construction at the Fort Peck Dam. Fortunately for us, Diane Arbus (1923-1971) is represented by a pleasant image of two women gaily laughing at a third trying to do a somersault, instead of her usual morbidly curious pictures of mentally retarded and physically disabled people -- her "freaks" as she called them.

The tiny 1961 black-and-white picture, Dolls I, does disservice to the talents of Marie Cosindas (b.1925) whose more recent large-format Polaroids breathtakingly capture Spanish dancers, famous faces, and luminous still-lifes. (But then Eastman wouldn't want to promote the competition, no?)

The most mesmerizing image in this collection is the 1970 picture of Twinka Thieband taken by Judy Dater (b. 1941). Dater had been taking nudes of her model for most of a shoot. She then suggested that Thieband slip into a sheer dress for another series of images. When Dater had finished fussing with and arranging all her apparatus, she turned around and was startled to see Twinka sitting silently waiting for her in this unplanned pose.

A large number of visitors appear to be troubled by Joan Myers's (b. 1944) large platinum print with watercolor wash, Buttocks, obviously those of an older, flaccid-toned woman. This picture, along with June -- another, thinner, older woman -- are from Myers's series "Women of a Certain Age," that plainly deals with the concept of beauty and aging, something to be thoughtfully considered rather than swept under the rug. Far and away the most disquieting picture in the entire exhibit is Nancy Burson's (b. 1948) untitled photo of a malformed face that looks like a "gray" from The X-Files. To everyone's relief, this is not a single image of some poor unfortunate but an expertly constructed, computer-generated composite of discrete elements -- a little girl's mouth, an old man's nose -- which together create the disconcerting visage.

"Insight" covers the alphabet from albumen print to Xerox with techniques, styles, and imagery that represent the often neglected impact women have had on photography over the past 150 years. A footnote to women's history, perhaps, but a full chapter in the story of modern art.

WAM is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call (508) 799-4406.