pia

As literature fails to represent women in photography in the historiography, women’s professional labour has mainly been invisible. Although their patience, care and nimble fingers were desirable attributes to help with the studio rooms, filling orders, calming sitters and retouching, the work of taking the photograph was mainly done by men (Riches 2014). The image of the Kodak Girl, a young female body holding the camera in her hands did not change for decades. In the 1920’s the Kodak Girl became a mother figure that made family memories (Riches 2014).

So how are female photographers viewed today? As professional operators and artistic creators? Or are women’s photography viewed as an extension of their domestic feminised work, amateur memory makers, playing at being professional? To answer this question I have accessed Dreamstime.com a site for royalty-free photos and stock photography. I screen captured the first eight pages for the search ‘female photographer’. My findings shape this project.

Within the pages for ‘female photographer’ I found a good balance of posed female bodies holding the camera in their hands like the Kodak Girl and women holding the camera up to their eye – but for many of these images the exposed eye look directly at the viewer and is not closed as when taking a photo, therefore a model (body) with a camera in hand. The dominant images were either of a model in a studio holding a camera, a woman taking a selfie, or a woman on holiday making happy memories with her camera. There were several images of female photographers taking photos of weddings, families, friends and a few images of women photographers photographing female models. In the mix were 33 images of a man photographing a woman, while I could only count 2 images of a woman photographing a man. Remembering that this was a search for female photographers.

From these findings I fashioned four characters that represent the perspective of stock images on the female photographer. They are named: Trinity Masculinity, Memory Maker, Momtographer and Influencer. All characters are performed by me.

References:

Dreamstime(n.d.), Dreamstime, Dreamstime.

Riches H (2017). Pixand Clicks: Photography and the New ‘Digital’ Domesticity, Oxford Art Journal, 40(1): 185–198.