Recover the stories of long-overlooked American women who, at a time when women rarely worked outside the home, became commercial photographers and shaped the new, challenging medium. Covering two generations of photographers ranging from New York City to California's mining districts, this study goes beyond a broad survey and explores individual careers through primary sources and new materials. Profiles of the photographers animate their careers by exploring how they began, the details of running their own studios, and their visual output. The featured photos vary in form-daguerreotype, tintype, carte de visite, and more-and subject, including Civil War portraits, postmortem photography, and landscape photography. This welcome resource fills in gaps in photographic, American, and women's history and convincingly lays out the parallels between the growth of photography as an available medium and the late-19th-century women's movement.

About the Author
Katherine Manthorne is an art history professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and has been a visiting professor in Venice, Copenhagen, and Berlin. She writes about American landscape art and 19th-century women's contributions to art and culture.

Reviews

"A revealing portrait of early forgotten women commercial photographers in this graceful and thoughtful illustrated history . . . astute . . . This focused work brings forgotten history to life and will attract feminists and photographers alike."

-Publishers Weekly

Book Information
ISBN 9780764360169
Author Katherine Manthorne
Format Hardback
Page Count 144
Imprint Schiffer Publishing Ltd
Publisher Schiffer Publishing Ltd
Weight(grams) 953g
Dimensions(mm) 267mm * 229mm * 16mm