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Behind the lens: women in photography 📷
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!
Julia Margaret Cameron took up the camera at the age of forty-eight, converting a chicken coop into a photo studio and enlisting friends to pose as figures from myths and legends. Critics of the time were openly hostile to her unorthodox methods, yet she persevered. Learn the story behind Cameron’s otherworldly portraits.
Content produced by : San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
To learn more about the birth of photography in the 19th century, click here!
DiscoverOn the agenda

video - 4:02
Pictures from a glass house: Julia Margaret Cameron’s portraits
By: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

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