Women Photographers of the Pacific World, 1857–1930

Anne Maxwell

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000036503
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This is the first book to examine the lives and works of women photographers active in the settler colonial nations of the Pacific Rim from 1857–1930. The few histories of women's photography that have been written so far have been confined to developments in Britain, France, Germany and the USA, and have overwhelmingly focused on artistic photography, ignoring the whole area of commercial photography. Taking 12 case studies as representative of the many women who entered the profession between 1857 and 1930, this book deals with both early 20th-century artistic and ethnographic photography in the region and 19th-century commercial photography. In addition to asking how female photographers coped with the pressure of being women in a male-dominated profession, what was new about the techniques and methods they deployed, and the kinds of artistic visions they brought to bear on their subjects, it breaks new ground by asking how they responded as photographers to the on-going decimation and displacement of indigenous peoples as white settlement and capitalism became ever more entrenched across the new world territories of the Pacific Rim, and photography more influenced by the international art movements of Pictorialism and Modernism.

1
Introduction

In the year 2000, the eminent art historian Naomi Rosenblum opened her magisterial History of Women Photographers with the following remark:

[U]ntil fairly recent times women’s work in photography did not receive its due consideration. Because the selection of what shall be remembered had been done throughout photographic history by male scholars, women tended to be dismissed or slighted. This process obscured significant contributions by some once well-known individuals, and it ignored entirely those who never made it into the spotlight.¹

Rosenblum’s book attends to many women photographers who did once make it into the spotlight but whose names are now forgotten, and some who have been entirely overlooked by historians; however, it includes few who lived and worked outside Europe or the USA. This book aims to help fill the gap by focusing on works by a select group of white women who lived and worked in the major settler communities on either side of the Pacific during the mid- to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including both immigrants to the region and some who were born there. Treating these as case studies, my book indicates how complex and varied settler women’s photography was in this part of the world, not only in terms of content, technique and style but also in social and cultural impact, including over time.

Women’s photography in these places has not been well documented in spite of the fact that much of it outstripped the amount and quality of work produced elsewhere during the period in question. At a time of large-scale European settlement and rapid social and economic change both in and around the Pacific, a growing number of practitioners adopted photography as a means of making a living while recording the changes taking place around them and supplying the fast-expanding market for portraits of the region’s newly prosperous settlers. My study focuses on the settler societies of Australasia and the North American states bordering the Pacific, along with the island state of Hawai’i, all of which formed a distinctive geographical area that became increasingly connected culturally and economically during the period under review. My study does not include other island groups, such as Samoa, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Tonga, because there were no white women working as photographers for any significant length of time in these places and of those who did practice photography either professionally or in an amateur capacity, no significant body of work survives that we know of.

Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen have classed the white settler societies that sprang up in and around the Pacific during the nineteenth century as ‘new world states’.² By contrast with the minority white settler communities in places such as Palestine, Angola, Mozambique and Algeria, those in North America and Australasia became majority populations. As Patrick Wolfe points out, Indigenous landowners in settler-majority colonies were displaced to permit the exploitation of land rather than simply being retained as a subject labour force.³ Extending Wolfe’s argument, Lorenzo Veracini has explored the differences between settler colonies and colonial formations with Indigenous majorities, where colonialism was premised on maintaining difference and inequality by indefinitely reproducing relations of subordination and subjugation. Veracini argues that the settler colonialisms established across the Pacific were united by a determination ‘to erase colonized subjectivities’.⁴ Settlers from these places shared a belief that the land occupied by Indigenous peoples was there for the taking, together with its valuable mineral resources, and the colonies were destined to see the formation of modern advanced societies mimicking and rivalling those of Europe.

Places as far apart as Melbourne and Sydney in Australia, Auckland and Wellington in New Zealand, Honolulu in Hawai’i, Victoria in British Columbia and San Francisco in California were also united through their common support of programs of settlement centred on the idea of a transplanted Anglo-Saxon race. Penelope Edmonds describes this as a commonality of spaces and ideas about race, saying, ‘In the mid-nineteenth century, these Pacific Rim settler colonies were often framed as British cognate spaces, as a “sort of England” or as “Great Britains” reduplicated in other hemispheres’.⁵ She adds that all these colonies cultivated myths of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, which were developed in tandem with an increasing bourgeois metropolitanism and a colony building that involved ‘the rapid regulation and segregation of bodies and spaces along increasingly hardening racial lines’.⁶

Such unity of thought found expression not just in the political and social realm but also in the cultural practices that characterised most of these Pacific-based societies. Photography was among the most powerful of these practices. As well as playing a prominent role in communicating and perpetuating racialist norms and ideals, it also helped promulgate the myth of these colonies’ ‘whiteness’ and promoted the colonists’ sense of belonging. But photography by itself is not inherently allied to any specific ideologies or politics, and it can have very different effects depending on where and how it is applied. While many of the photographs produced in these settler colonies functioned to perpetuate the myth of ‘whiteness’, others had the effect of destabilising this myth, whether by incorporating references to Indigenous resistance and resilience or by testifying to the growing prevalence of racial and cultural hybridity.

*

The first person known to have fixed a permanent photographic image was the Frenchman Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, who used silver-coated plates for the purpose in 1839. This innovation was followed almost immediately by the Englishman Henry Fox Talbot’s invention of paper negatives, which not only fixed images but also allowed multiple copies to be made. From these beginnings, photography spread across the globe within just a few decades. Americans were among its strongest enthusiasts. For example, the first American daguerreotype was made in late 1839 less than a year after Daguerre’s invention was reported in American newspapers, while in Australia and New Zealand this occurred in 1841 and 1848 respectively, and Americans were among the first to establish well-appointed portrait studios in both places.⁷

The new art attracted women as well as men. As Rosenblum has observed, well-to-do women in Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and the USA were among the first to have cameras. Sufficiently wealthy to employ nursemaids and servants, they had time to devote to recreational pursuits, not to mention the funds required to pay for tuition and buy cameras and darkroom equipment.⁸ The first women photographers were therefore amateurs from the leisured classes.⁹ Middle- and working-class women had neither the money nor the time to practise such an expensive, absorbing hobby.

While wealthy women exercised their talents as amateurs, men exerted a dominant influence on the technology itself and its commercial and industrial applications. This began with the invention and elaboration of cameras, lenses, photographic media and papers, where men at all stages took a commanding role. As Cynthia Cockburn has argued, the emergence of new technologies has generally consolidated men’s power, not only because their dominance in science and engineering has allowed them to set the terms of industrial development but also because the processes they devised have often entrenched existing gender inequalities.¹⁰

Photography emerged at a time of acute inequality between women and men in industrial societies. Nineteenth-century women were barred from entering most trades and professions and had little opportunity to acquire training in work-related skills. Though women’s workforce participation gradually increased over the century, they were rarely admitted to membership of the professional organisations, craft societies and trade unions that regulated access to the trades and professions. Cockburn has argued that even after the pre-industrial system of crafts broke down under the impact of industrialisation, male-dominated unions of skilled workers managed to exclude women from skilled occupations:

Men could do little to prevent capital engaging women to work in the new industries. Men’s efforts therefore had to be geared to segregating women and maintaining sexual divisions within the factory. Consciously and actively, male workers hedged women into unskilled and low-paid occupations. In printing, for instance, the male compositors and machine-minders confined women to book-binding and other print finishing operations where they were severely exploited by employers.¹¹

The same factors were at work in photography, as in other media industries. Most workplaces, including all but the smallest photographic enterprises, remained male-dominated in their operations and hierarchical structures, with women working in subordinate positions, often classified as ‘assistants’ to male workers and paid at much lower rates.

One of the few avenues open for women to become professional photographers in the mid-nineteenth century was to acquire skills by going into business with their husbands or other male family members. This pattern persisted into the 1850s and 1860s, when women began nominating photography as a career, buoyed by the growing number of photography-related positions that started to become available. The defining shift arguably began in the late 1850s, when commercial photography eclipsed amateur photography as the dominant mode.¹²

Initially, women who entered the studios were mostly confined to subordinate roles as assistants or retouchers,¹³ but they came to occupy a wider range of roles over the next two decades, as cameras became lighter and printing processes more reliable. The replacement of the wet-plate collodion process by the dry-plate method opened new opportunities for women, since it meant that photographic techniques could be mastered with relatively little training. Gelatin-coated negatives could also be developed at any time after the image was captured, whereas wet-plate negatives had to be developed without delay and were extremely messy to work with.¹⁴

Once Western women of all classes breached the barriers to becoming professional photographers, there was a veritable explosion of women’s interest in the medium. By the early twentieth century, not only were thousands of women working as commercial photographers in Europe and America but also the number of women amateurs taking up photography had begun to swell. A similar pattern prevailed across the white settler colonies in the Pacific, although in many cases the small size of the populations limited the business and training opportunities available. Many of the women from these communities also had little time for hobbies; white women in most settler colonies had numerous children and had to raise them without assistance from their own extended families. Furthermore, because of the great distances between settlements and the scarcity of shipping routes, roads and railways, photographic materials, instruction manuals and technical literature were expensive and often difficult to obtain.

Across the settler colonies, there were significant differences in the opportunities available to women. For example, in North America, women were employed in larger numbers and had a better chance of setting up in business than in other parts of the Pacific. By the 1880s, the number of female-owned photography studios in the USA generally was increasing faster than anywhere else in the world.¹⁵ The reasons are not hard to discern. The North American economy had expanded at an impressive rate, and women in many parts of the USA could procure bank loans and some could even own their own businesses, unlike their counterparts in Britain and her colonies, where married women’s property rights and bank loans were still being uniformly restricted by legislation. Because America was awash with immigrants, women photographers also came from a greater variety of class and ethnic backgrounds, bringing a range of skills and abilities.

The early establishment of the women’s suffrage movement may also have contributed to the flourishing of photography among American women. Although American women did not gain the vote until after their sisters in Australia and New Zealand, they had begun to agitate for the suffrage almost four decades earlier. As early as July 1848, the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention had pressed for the female vote and encouraged women to become more self-reliant, including by setting up in business and entering the practical professions.¹⁶

Durin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I The First Settler Women Photographers
• PART II Women Photographers of the Late Nineteenth Century
• PART III Ethnographic Pictorialists, 1903–1930
• PART IV The Persistence of Pictorialism
• Index