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Take the power: be photograph! When women are behind the camera 📷
What can a woman do with a camera? That's the question Frances Benjamin Johnston, one of the first American women photographers, asked in 1897. Often photographed, women were also on the other side of the lens. Photography became for women a way of empowerment and to free themselves from the male gaze. Explore the pictures took by Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Julia Margaret Cameron or Zanele Muholi. And discover what a woman with a camera can do! Taking pictures: a feminist commitment!

Listen to artist Zanele Muholi introduce their series of powerful self-portraits, Somnyama Ngonyama. These images are acts of resistance, with Muholi turning the camera on themself to explore the politics of race and representation, combining personal stories and experiences of racism with colonial and apartheid histories of exclusion and displacement.

Content produced by : Tate

On the agenda
video - 2:11
“I needed to remember me” – Zanele Muholi on their series Somnyama Ngonyama
By: Tate
podcast - 51:46
Ami Bouhassane on Lee Miller
By: The Great Women Artists
podcast - 44:12
William J. Simmons on Cindy Sherman
By: The Great Women Artists
video - 4:02
Pictures from a glass house: Julia Margaret Cameron’s portraits
By: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art