Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics

Claire Raymond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317242451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics makes the case for a feminist aesthetics in photography by analysing key works of twenty-two women photographers, including cis- and trans-woman photographers.

Claire Raymond provides close readings of key photographs spanning the history of photography, from nineteenth-century Europe to twenty-first century Africa and Asia. She offers original interpretations of well-known photographers such as Diane Arbus, Sally Mann, and Carrie Mae Weems, analysing their work in relation to gender, class, and race. The book also pays close attention to the way in which indigenous North Americans have been represented through photography and the ways in which contemporary Native American women photographers respond to this history.

Developing the argument that through aesthetic force emerges the truly political, the book moves beyond polarization of the aesthetic and the cultural. Instead, photographic works are read for their subversive political and cultural force, as it emerges through the aesthetics of the image.

This book is ideal for students of Photography, Art History, Art and Visual Culture, and Gender.

1

Myths of origin

Julia Margaret Cameron and Clementina Hawarden

A silence attends Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden, or Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822–1865), as she is better known. She left no written record explaining her photographs and apparently left very little written record of her thoughts on any subject. Instead, the traces she left are the many exquisite and enigmatically staged photographs that she took of her eldest daughters, Isabella and Clementina, in London in the early 1860s.¹ The daughters preserved these photographs in albums, as wealthy Victorian families typically did, with the difference that Hawarden’s family considered Hawarden an important photographer: they kept the photographs she created as family treasures, private, but of public import. They considered them art, rather than memorabilia. Her granddaughter brought the photographs to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 1939. Mark Haworth-Booth, a curator of photographs at the Victoria and Albert from 1977–2004, recollects:

Lady Clementina Tottenham had seen the exhibition [commemorating 100 years of photography] and wished to know why her grandmother, Lady Hawarden – an important pioneer – had not been included. “Unfortunately, your ladyship,” my predecessor replied, “the museum possesses no photographs by Lady Hawarden.” Lady Tottenham returned with 775 photographs, which she gave to the Museum. The war soon intervened and it was not until 1968 that the photographs were all fully mounted, numbered and listed.²

A sleep of more than 100 years, from 1864 until 1968, enfolded Hawarden’s photographs. In this chapter, I investigate the terms of that sleep and awakening, interpreting Hawarden’s photographs as images that lucidly articulate the gendered terms of her silence.

Photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879), also an aristocratic Victorian British mother, refused to be mistaken for a woman creating a family album. Even so, she created albums of her photographs to send to male artists, scientists, and photographers whom she admired and from whom she hoped to elicit mutual admiration. Cameron, unlike Hawarden, left clear and strong written statements regarding her photography. In particular, her Annals of My Glass House makes the case that photography as such, and Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography in particular, could aspire to and would accomplish the status of great art.³ Cameron compared her photographs not so much to works by other photographers but rather to paintings, thus claiming for herself a place among artists of genius. Indeed, genius and greatness were concepts that very much drew Cameron’s attention. She sought the company of men whom she considered geniuses, from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the poet, to G. F. Watts, the painter, to John Herschel, the scientist. She sought to photograph men whom she saw as paradigms – exemplars – of male genius. In turn, Cameron argued that her photographs of such men, as well as the many photographs she took of her housemaids, demonstrated her own artistic genius.⁴ In this chapter, I investigate the terms of Cameron’s relationship to male artists as a way to unpack the photographs she created.

The social code of the “great” artist who has “genius” is no more real than the social code of the good Victorian mother.⁵ Hawarden and Cameron worked under the rubric of these social myths, and their photographs contend with them. To understand their photographic oeuvres, I begin by interpreting the photographers’ place in a society that did not regard women as capable of intellectual or artistic accomplishments comparable to those of men. Importantly, this was also a culture that did not regard photography as a proper medium for fine art. I read Hawarden and Cameron in contrast to and in conjunction with each other not only because of their obvious proximity in time, nationality, and class – both were wealthy women photographers living and working primarily in England during the Victorian era – but also because both photographers anchored their photographic projects with the use of widely circulated Victorian cultural myths. Here I use the term myth in the way that Roland Barthes develops its understanding in Mythologies.⁶ By invoking myth, I do not refer to the way that Cameron uses names from classical mythology to title her photographs, although I will also consider her tactics in that regard. Instead, I indicate the way that Cameron deploys the cultural myth of the artist as a transcendent genius to leverage her photographic project, keeping in mind that photography was not universally considered a fine art, much less an expression of genius, in the 1860s as she began her short career. In a similar fashion, Hawarden positioned herself as the mythical good mother: giving birth ten times, she produced a family of eight living children, the youngest of whom was scarcely more than a toddler when Hawarden, then in her early forties, died suddenly of pneumonia. When she began to practice photography, Hawarden clearly undertook the work seriously and intensely, producing an oeuvre of nearly 800 images in some seven years, from the late 1850s to 1864, the year of her death. Working with silver collodion wet plate, she created photographic work that is radically different from today’s digital photography. To create any photographic images, much less images as brilliant as those she produced, Hawarden had to master the complex technique. Mastery of that material process, of course, did not mean that she would produce images worth seeing, but as it happened, she did produce an oeuvre of subtly melancholic, enigmatically claustral photographs. Her daughters stored these photographs in an album, which meant that the edges of the prints got torn. Hawarden’s photographs of her adolescent daughters, for which she is best known, were taken in her home at 5 Princes Garden in London.⁷ Photographically, one may say that Hawarden never departed from the role of aristocratic mother; in her most powerful photographs, she never leaves her beautiful home and never turns her gaze from her children. And yet, what she does with that gaze is to produce photographs that visually subvert the ideal of the home-enclosed mother.

Myths

The artist positioning himself or herself according to widely accepted contemporary myths is a practice hardly exclusive to Julia Margaret Cameron and Lady Clementina Hawarden. But because these photographers were at the vanguard of women in photography – indeed, the 1860s and the 1870s were among the first decades of photography, an era during which the idea that photography was a fine art was by no means generally accepted – their use of cultural myth to place themselves as artists is of special interest. For the desire to photograph (as Geoffrey Batchen usefully sets the phrase in Burning with Desire) arises broadly in the early nineteenth century, an amalgam of cultural, scientific, and aesthetic practices.⁸ Hawarden and Cameron burned with this desire to photograph, thereby devoting immense energy and time to creating photographic images, the fate of which could not have been entirely clear to them. Even as Cameron positioned herself through her written rhetoric as an artist of genius, there was scant precedent and scanter agreement regarding whether and how photography could occupy the realm of fine art.⁹

Not only as a woman but also as a photographer, Cameron’s path to being recognized for artistic genius was not clearly delineated in the early 1860s, when she created a darkroom in what had been the family chicken coop.¹⁰ Hawarden and Cameron created their photographs using wet plate collodion technology: they mixed the chemicals with which to coat the plates to create their negatives, and they developed their own direct silver prints (meaning that their prints were the same size as their negatives).¹¹ As noted, Hawarden’s photographs, as they have come down to us, are often torn at the edges, markers of their long sojourn in family albums. Critic Carol Mavor argues persuasively that this history is part of the images, part of their meaning.¹² Cameron’s photographs were better preserved in that she became de facto artist-in-residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which began purchasing her photographs only a couple of years after she began taking them.

Cameron’s claim to genius was an effective echoing of the terms used in her immediate social circle to describe men upon whom the Victorian role of sage, or man of genius, was inscribed. Cameron asked the well-known poets, painters, and scientists in her social circle to accept that her photographs of them captured the image of their genius. But in this claim, she also implied that the power of the images stemmed from her genius. Cameron leverages the idea of a generative force that is specially reserved for art, for the image, and for the artist who creates the image, thus pulling this term genius toward herself when she absolves her photographs of the need for technical perfection. Instead, her goal is the work of massing shadow and form and vivifying symbol. Time has proven Cameron right, as she is now regarded as a preeminent portrait photographer of the Victorian era.

If Cameron is best understood as a photographer who consciously and cannily positioned herself as a publicly recognized artist – however controversial the artistic reputation of her medium and her work in her day – Hawarden, having left no written record of her approach to photography, seems to retreat into a secret, enigmatic room. But that secret room is the very room where Hawarden spent hours, days, and years photographing her daughters. My suggestion is that Hawarden is less mysterious and rather more a photographer who, like Cameron, positioned herself by using cultural myth and widely held cultural beliefs. She created a persona as a decorous aristocratic mother who remained in the home and devoted herself to her children, using photographs to subvert this role. The photographs that Hawarden created in and of this private room quietly overturn the terms of entrapment that the images poignantly convey. The feminist resistance to stifling domesticity that is palpable in Cameron’s claiming of her own genius might seem to be missing in Hawarden’s ultratraditional life, but I suggest that Hawarden, like Cameron, availed herself of the most accessible myth to frame her artistic practice. Hawarden, like Cameron, used myth to launch, frame, and sustain the creation of a photographic oeuvre, forging a space in which to create art despite a relative lack of public esteem and recognition.¹³

The viscountess

The future Lady Clementina Hawarden was born in 1822, the daughter of Admiral Charles Elphinstone Fleeming and Catalina Alessandro, a Spanish beauty a quarter century younger than her husband.¹⁴ Hawarden’s ascendance into the wealthier aristocracy came about through her marriage to Cornwallis Maude, Viscount Hawarden, in 1845. A wealthy woman upon her marriage, with servants to attend to her housework and childcare duties, Hawarden was physically taxed in producing, for the 20 years of her married life, a child nearly every other year. Whatever her feelings about these many pregnancies, and regardless of support from household staff, the physical strain of being constantly pregnant and repeatedly giving birth cannot have been a luxurious experience for her.¹⁵ Hawarden was known in her social circle as a “great baby lover,” so it seems she translated the experience of repeated pregnancies into a socially accepted and perhaps personally satisfying myth of maternal grace.¹⁶

And yet, by the late 1850s, she was apparently looking for something to do beyond producing babies, as she began taking photographs using a stereoscopic camera around 1857.¹⁷ Despite giving birth to three more children after she began to pursue photography, Hawarden produced a large and apparently intensely sought oeuvre of photographs between 1857 and 1864. Decisively, the family’s move to 5 Princes Garden at the end of the 1850s provided Hawarden with what became her photography studio. It appears that she sequestered the entire first floor of the home as her space in which to make photographs.¹⁸ She and her eldest girls must have devoted significant amounts of time to the project, in that producing 800 photographs with wet plate collodion process would have been a labor-intensive accomplishment. The photographs also evince a “fingerprint” in that nothing looks like a Hawarden...