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Why are there so few women in the history of photography? Scholarly contributions have highlighted the obstacles that hindered women’s success in photography, as well as the ideological foundations of photographic history that have kept them invisible within dominant narratives. Despite this, the role of women in photography remains under-researched, particularly on those practitioners active between the invention of the medium around 1839 and the outbreak of World War II in 1939. This international conference aims to give visibility to women in photography during the first century of its history by uncovering their identities and stories through the lens of women’s history and gender studies, revitalising forgotten or overlooked female figures, and revising dominant historical accounts which centre prominent male photographers and photographic businesses.

The conference draws on the methodological approach of decolonial feminist studies, which acknowledges that individuals and social groups who have been (and continue to be) marginalised face the greatest difficulties and obstacles in bearing witness to their own exclusion. Recent contributions that merge gender history, labor history, and feminist critical theory provide an additional methodological framework. This dialogue has led to the rediscovery of previously overlooked forms of women’s labor, both within and beyond the domestic sphere. Following feminist economic perspectives, we understand domestic labor as a central component of productive labor. As a result, the very concept of work has been broadened, shifting the focus to the diverse forms, modalities, and qualities of women’s labor.

The conference will include three sections, each based upon Fotografiste’s main objectives:

• Reframing photographic history by building a more inclusive, trans-disciplinary and transnational narrative, capable of doing justice to the often hidden roles of women as labourers, practitioners, and entrepreneurs across different photography sectors;
• Enhancing accessibility to archives by creating new archival records and updating existing ones to include information on women’s roles in photography;
• Engaging with local communities by fostering involvement in participatory events aimed at the valorisation of photo historical heritage and at tackling issues of gender inequality.

We invite papers and visual presentations from emerging and established scholars, archivists, and artists. Participatory practice-led research is welcome.

We are looking for contributions that:

• Move beyond medium specificity, offering an alternative to dominant narratives shaped by traditional art history;
• Look at photographs not solely as authorial images, but also as parts of integrated networks of different media, businesses, practices, technologies, materialities, and fields of knowledge;
• Examine previously overlooked women's roles in photography by using diverse sources and underexplored archival materials that have rarely been considered by historians of photography;
• Identify the roles and functions women played within photographic culture, industry, and businesses, and explore how these roles have transformed over time;
• Produce a trans-disciplinary, transnational, and materially oriented historical narrative on photography, linked to the history of women’s emancipation, and deeply informed by cultural, social, and economic history;
• Make under-analysed collections accessible and valorize them by highlighting archival relationships that can uncover new data and narratives about women in photography;
• Question archival standards and advocate for descriptions of photographic materials that are informed by women's history and gender studies;
• Address the impact of dominant historical narratives within the ecosystems of archives;
• Engage with digital humanities to analyse historical sources and propose innovative methodologies of data processing to reveal possible connections and cross paths of women's careers;
• Present case studies that use photography to promote a more inclusive engagement with heritage by enhancing collective awareness about the role of women in society;
• Analyse case studies involving local communities in the co-creation of cultural production in photography;
• Present projects that emphasize citizens' rights to access photographic heritage and their active participation in its preservation and valorisation.

Please submit an abstract of 300 to 400 words and a short bio of 200 to 300 words via email to fotografiste.conference@gmail.com by 15 June 2025. Accepted applicants will be notified by 30 June 2025. Each speaker will have 20 minutes to present their paper. Travel and accommodation expenses will be covered. Following the conference, selected papers will be considered for publication. The event will be held in English. For any queries, please contact fotografiste.conference@gmail.com.

Women in Photography: Practitioners, Labourers, Entrepreneurs in a Global Perspective (1839-1939)

Final conference of PRIN 2022 PNRR NextGenerationEU funded project Fotografiste: Women in Photography from Italian Archives, 1839-1939, conducted by IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca and Brera Academy of Fine Arts Milan

Milan, Brera Academy of Fine Arts

November 20-21, 2025

Advisory Board:
Linda Bertelli, IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca
Costanza Caraffa, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz
Patrizia Di Bello, Birkbeck College, University of London
Malavika Karlekar, Centre for Women's Development Studies, New Delhi
Nicoletta Leonardi, Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan
Kylie Thomas, University College Cork
Akram Zaatari, artist/filmmaker

For more information about the project, to learn about the research team members, and for bibliographic references, please visit our website: www.fotografiste.com

Dr Hanin Hannouch & Janine Freeston, have created a working group on color photography circa 1900, hosted by the Consortium of Science, Technology & Medicine. "The purpose of this working group is to propel a rising field of research; color photography in the 19th and early 20th century in order to reconfigure, expand, and problematize its role in the history of the discipline and in the historical contexts out of which it emerged." 

So far, 100 people have joined the group and so can you by clicking on this link!

Membership is free, easy, and it will give you access to a vivacious Resource section with free articles, videos, & our ever-growing multi-lingual bibliography on turn-of-the-century color photography.

The December 20, 4 PM UK time session will feature a presentation by Janine Freeston about "Women Making Color Photographs"

Abstract: Who are the women who produced color photographs? How did they contribute to the nascent trichromatic color photography processes at the turn of the last century? Are there more of them languishing in archives who have yet to be fully appreciated and how scholars uncover it? As the history of photography continues to evolve in its appreciation of women photographers, the substantial significance that women contributors made to color photography requires consolidation, such as Angelina Acland, Agnes Warburg, Violet Blaiklock, Marjory T. Hardcastle and Olive Edis to name a few. This talk highlights women working on unresolved color processes that demanded more technical, scientific and methodological prowess than that required from their counterparts working in monochrome. For example, some processes lacked chromatic fidelity, and yet a cohort of experimenting highly skilled photographers, a significant number of whom were women, persevered to offer numerous nuanced improvements that had evolved through their practical experiences or supplied work that supported the commercial potential that color photography presented.
I hope to appeal to members of this working group to interrogate their own resources and work together in amassing geographical, technical and biographical findings from the locations they are familiar with to provide a cogent and geographically balanced historical perspective highlighting the means and methods of contributions made by women beyond the exhibition of images. 

Also, on the menu, right after Janine is my short talk "Who is Gabriel Lippmann?"

Known for being a scientist and professor at La Sorbonne, color photographer, winner of the 1908 Nobel prize for physics, Lippmann's position in the history of (color) photography and that of his process "interferential color photography" can be described as awkward, at best. Why is that and who is he? Tune in to find out!

We will also be looking back at the wonderful speakers our working group has featured so far & revealing next year's schedule! 

Hanin

As part of the PhotoOxford Festival 2020 staff and affiliated researchers of the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum have taken a fresh look at their collection of around 300,000 historic and contemporary photographs, and picked out one that for them resonates strongly with the Festival's theme, 'Women and Photography: Ways of Seeing and Being Seen'. Although working mostly from home, staff have made use of the Museum's online database, where 65% of the collection is available in digital form online.

https://prm.web.ox.ac.uk/event/photography-and-women

This symposium adds to the growing body of feminist scholarship that is deconstructing the male-dominated history of commercial and industrial artistic production. The programme will bring together current interdisciplinary perspectives on women’s experiences of work and the gendered dynamics of commerce in the creative industries in Britain between 1750 and 1950.

We invite critical and creative papers as well as those that present case-studies or deliver in more collaborative formats.

Contributions may focus on, but are not limited to, women at work or women’s involvement in the development of technologies i.e printmaking, photography, film and computing, women’s work in textiles (including dressmaking and millinery), design, architecture, advertising, bookmaking and publishing, the performing arts, music, TV and radio.

We are particularly interested in papers that consider the following topics:

• Spaces of women’s work: the workshop, the studio, the office, the factory, and work carried out from home (i.e. sweated trades) 
• Overlaps in women’s professional and domestic roles
• Collaboration, networks and unions of women workers and professionals
• Women’s management of finances and the economic factors of their work
• Women’s experiences of discrimination in the workplace in this period
• Anonymity or invisibility of women’s work and theft of their intellectual property
• Demands of emotional labour in the creative industries
• Distinctions and slippages between professional and amateur ‘work’
• Historiographies of women’s work in the creative industries
• Portrayals of professional women in literature and the visual arts
• How the campaign for suffrage intersected with, or affected, women’s work in the creative industries.

We invite abstracts of 250 words for 20-minute papers. Please submit abstracts and a short biographical note to Erika Lederman, Hannah Lyons and George Mind at womenworkcommerce@gmail.com by 6pm on Friday 30 November 2018.

‘Women, Work and Commerce in the Creative Industries, Britain 1750 – 1950’ is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and organised by Collaborative Doctoral Partnership students Erika Lederman (De Montfort University/V&A) Hannah Lyons (Birkbeck, University of London/ V&A) and George Mind (University of Westminster/National Portrait Gallery).

UPDATE: Conference registration is now available here. 

Women, Work and Commerce in the Creative Industries, Britain 1750 - 1950

Saturday 9 February 2019, 9.30am – 5.30pm

Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London

Keynote Speakers: Dr Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Dr Patricia Zakreski

Call for papers

We at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts have been investigating the early London career of British photographer Florence Vandamm, who worked in NYC from 1924 to her retirement in 1962.  We discovered that she opened her first studio in London in 1908.  This site has been very helpful at providing resources and links. 

The exhibition (Pioneering Poet of Light: Florence Vandamm & the Vandamm Studio) will open in mid-September and runs through the end of February.  Please visit. Click here: http://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/poet-light-florence-vandamm-vandamm-studio

We are blogging about Vandamm's work on the Library's www.nypl.org.  You can find them in he Vandamm channel or under my name.

Image: Re-discovered image from a glass negative of the Theatre Guild's 1928 production of Faust, NYPL.