February 1–July 13, 2025 “Although the result is obtained by chemical means, the little work it entails will greatly […]
February 1–July 13, 2025
“Although the result is obtained by chemical means, the little work it entails will greatly please ladies.” So wrote one of photography’s inventors, Jacques-Louis-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), about his eponymous daguerreotype in 1839. Daguerre’s words, which associate women with idleness, are clearly misogynistic. Yet in a backhanded way, Daguerre predicted the pivotal role women would play in photography since its invention in the 1830s. Undaunted by photographic chemistry—and often neglected or derided by their male peers—women have made huge contributions to the development of the medium across a variety of genres.
In the nineteenth century, photography was more accessible than established artistic disciplines like painting and sculpture because it was new and thus free from conventional training that historically prohibited women. It was relatively inexpensive to start and could be practiced at home with makeshift darkrooms set up in closets or bathrooms. Yet even with fewer barriers to entry, women faced their share of constraints in a male-dominated field. Expectations of gender often dictated the themes they could pursue, encouraging portraiture and still life rather than photographs of war and exploration.
Women took up photography in increasing numbers in the twentieth century, and by the 1930s, some of the most successful photographers in the world included Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Imogen Cunningham, all on view in this exhibition. Women in Focus, drawn from The San Diego Museum of Art’s permanent collection (which merged with the Museum of Photographic Arts in 2023), allows for a fuller account of the medium’s history by highlighting how women have shaped photography from the mid-nineteenth century to today.
Featured: Trude Fleischmann, Sibylle Binder (detail), ca. 1932. Gelatin silver print. Museum of Photographic Arts at The San Diego Museum of Art, Gift of Michael and Joyce Axelrod, M.1993.012.001. © Trude Fleischmann
