Does Female Photography Exist?

Handling a camera, taking photographs, capturing the picture of a person...to be a photographer means to perform. Unlike what it seems, the role of whoever is taking a photograph is very dynamic, active and present. The result is a picture which is never objective or factual reality but a subjective view of what it is portrayed. This is due not only to the choice of arrangement, framing, colour, effects, light, shade, exposure but also to the relation that is created between the photographer and what is being photograph. There is a long history of men taking pictures of women, but what do we know of women taking photographs of women? What does it mean for a woman to framed, portrayed and looked at by another woman?

When it comes to putting into a frame a woman, is the photographic gaze of women different from that of men? Perhaps we can see it as a form of narcissism and desire, perhaps its is a way for the female photographer to re-think, re-represent and re-posses the image of the woman away from how men sees and photographs them. In New York the Staley-Wise Gallery is exhibiting a series of photographs of women made by women for fashion, documentary or personal purposes. For those of us who are not in the USA, here is a selection of photographs, sensational images that speak about religion, motherhood, ethnicity, sexuality and maternity in different parts of the world.

La roja, Villafranca de los Caballeros, Spagna, 1980

Alessandra Sanguinetti, The necklace, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1999

Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Liz Gibbons as a photographer, 1938

Carolyn Drake, Food stalls in from of Khudayar Khan's palace, Kokand, Uzbekistan, 2007

Susan Meiselas Traditional Indian dance mask from the town of Monimbo, adopted by the rebels during the fight against Somoza to conceal identity, Nicaragua, 1978