A Pioneering Legacy: Early Women Photographers of Great Britain and Ireland, 1839 -1861

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2024-05

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De Montfort University

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Peer reviewed

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The early history of photography in Great Britain and Ireland frequently presents as a predominantly male activity, amateur or professional, with sporadic reference to a limited number of women practitioners. This obscures a large cohort of women who participated in photography from its inception, others assisting or facilitating photography without appropriate acknowledgment. This thesis documents the activities of early women photographers in Great Britain and Ireland between 1839 and 1861, exploring their contributions to photography and wider impact within mid nineteenth-century society. New research confirms key women actors situated within the early development of amateur and professional photography, but through interrogation of photographic histories and prior scholarship in combination with alternative resources including contemporary newspapers, trade directories, census returns and exhibition catalogues, many more geographically defined women photographers have been identified. Eliminating the requirement for image primacy or attribution has enabled a concentration on biographical content, shifting focus from the photograph to the photographer.

A significant area of research centres upon the social and legal context framing photographic intersection with societal challenges specific to women. Photography presented new opportunities to contest gender inequality through equal participation in photographic societies, image exhibition in parity with men, and advertising commercial photographic studios in equal but unregulated competition for new clientele. Women’s presence in the new photographic milieu provided new employment for unmarried women, defined as society’s unproductive ‘surplus’, financially supported by the Society for the Promotion of Employment of Women. Similarly, widows avoided penury by operation of a photographic studio following bereavement. Photographic technology was accessible to women across the social spectrum, disrupting an ethos of both class and gender segregation. The thesis explores women’s specific impact on traditional forms of illustration, photographic tuition, and active participation in a community rejecting ‘separate spheres’ ideology by encouraging interchange of ideas within informal social or scientific networks. The thesis concludes that women’s adoption of photography demonstrated their important non-domestic contributions to society, contesting traditional discriminatory mores and advancing photography at the outset of a creative revolution. I argue that British early women photographers are therefore of critical importance to a revisionist account of nineteenth-century visual culture and integral to a more inclusive representation of photographic history.

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