Reading photographs--visual records of time past--is a way of constructing versions of history. Interpretation includes assigning categories of meaning ("art," "document") to images, ordering them into sequences of other pictures and words, and from these pieces creating a narrative--which might be based upon chronology, a linear mode of perception, or differently grounded in circularity, indirection, and play, as memory and imagination, ideology and cultural context direct. Narrative patterns, that is, are potentially as multiple, and as changeable as readers of images (2).
Photographs invite an especially broad range of responses because of their widespread accessibility and use, from art museum to billboard, from police report to family snapshot album. A good example of the way in which responses to images alter over time, and of the varied cultural work that photographs do is Dorothea Lange's well-known "Migrant Mother" (fig P.1). When Lange took this picture in 1936 in a Nipomo, California, migrant workers' camp, she was on assignment for the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security

P 1: Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936. U.S. Farm Security Administration Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, no. USF34 2T0I-9058

This photograph would go on to have a life beyond both the FSA files in the Library of Congress and the MoMA holdings. Popular Photography would reproduce the image in 1960 along with Lange's account--a story about an exchange between an anonymous photographer in a hurry and an anonymous suffering woman that presents the making of the image as a two-way transaction. Headed home on a rainy day from a long assignment, passing a sign saying "Pea-Pickers Camp," something made her turn around and backtrack 20 miles. "I drove into that wet and soggy camp and parked my car like a homing pigeon," she recalled:

In later years, Lange would complain that the Library of Congress never reproduced Migrant Mother the same way twice, despite the guide print she supplied. And indeed, as the image became a kind of icon, assimilated into vernacular culture, it never was reproduced the same way twice. Margery Mann, in a 1970 Popular Photography story on Lange, recalled passing "the display window of an artist who would paint your portrait from your photograph, and amidst his samples, the glorified girls and the 30-year-old, slyly-smiling Bette Davis and the muscle men, sat 'Migrant Mother,' big as life, and blue and yellow and lilac." Closer to its original purpose, a Spanish Civil War artist would make a closely copied lithograph of the mother alone, entitled "The Spanish Mother, Terror of 1938." In 1964 the Latin American magazine Bohemia reproduced an artist's rendering of the photograph on its cover, turning the head of one child to show its face (fig. P.2). And in 1973 the Black Panther's Newsletter ran in full page an artist's version of the photograph which gave black features to the faces and the hair, adding the caption "Poverty is a crime, and our people are the victims" (fig. P.3). None of these credited Lange as the author of the image (8).

P 2: "Dia de las Madres", Bohemia Venezolana, (May 10, 1964), Oakland Museum.

P 3: Malik, "Poverty Is a Crime", Black Panthers' Newsletter 9, no. 8, (Dec. 7, 1972), back cover. Special Collections, Alderman Library, Univerisity of Virginia. 1972 by Huey P. Newton.

Migrant Mother, then, is not only a visual representation of "our history, but a picture with a sixty-year history of use and appropriation. An all inclusive icon--mother and child--it is also a locus for different stories, for alternative histories that have to do with class and race. In fact, the power of this image to convey both sameness and difference, not only in 1936 but in 1964 and 1973, suggests that throughout its history, its meanings have been and are constructed by powerful responses to it. And yet it is also Dorothea Lange's image--the work or a photographer who would claim her own physical and historical "outsidedness" as a source of special affinity for her suffering subjects. Her own "otherness," which made it possible for her to understand others' stories, was also the source for her claim to agency: to be a Photographer, a History Maker, a Storyteller. The question that interests me here is this strategy of claiming agency for oneself by representing otherness, particularly when it is practiced by women photographers emerging from a tradition (into which they at first tried to place themselves) of the history of art that had consistently represented them as other.
Lange, as well as Gertrude Käsebier, Imogen Cunningham and Laura Gilpin, have been variously referred to in the way Willa Cather described Sarah Orne Jewett: as having a "gift of sympathy (9)." The very mention of this term, however, calls for an immediate warning that the problem of speaking for those one can only approach--what Theodor Adorno called "the condition of all truth"--presupposes the resolution of an entire set of power relationships and decisions about a posture, a stance, a style of being present in the world of those who are considered voiceless (10). Any "power of sympathy" is challenged by this sense of absolute separateness of one's own reality from that of other persons. This split, Elaine Scarry argues, has to do with conceiving of the body from outside--"as parts, shapes, and mechanisms"--rather than in terms of capacities and needs, or as a source of aliveness. Self, body, other--these are the themes of this book whose focus is this question: to what extent is it possible to traverse this separating space, to be able to perceive another from within "the felt-experience of sentience? (11)"
To tie this problem to women's camera work is to tread between polarizing traps. Some women, because of the material circumstances of their own lives, are particularly responsive to "felt experience"; others are quite capable of abusing positions of power. Diane Arbus's trying on of alien experience--a kind of "panopticon of the spirit"; Margaret Bourke-White's descriptions of war--the work of killing and maiming--as pageantry and pattern; Cindy Sherman's performance art, a disguise of the self, represented as an illusion, a culturally constructed contrivance (12), all constitute a powerful argument against a "gift of sympathy" when the woman looks. I make no attempt to address a universal category called Woman, to sentimentalize women's work as a kind of utopian community. Instead, this is a study of work--some well known and heavily freighted, some heretofore unrecognized--by certain women photographers connected by time (from Gertrude Käsebier's work at the turn of the century to the late work of Imogen Cunningham and Laura Gilpin) and place (for the most part, the western United States), by interaction, example, and friendship. The narrative frame is neither chronological nor neat: the works of Käsebier, Cunningham, Lange, and Gilpin are of primary importance, but I also include a number of lesser known (and some virtually unknown) photographers; I focus on the early and middle part of the twentieth century, but Gilpin's and Cunningham's long careers lasted nearly to our own time and invite comparisons with contemporary works. Yet this wide focus is in its own way quite narrow: I have chosen to sacrifice broader inclusion (a wider net) for a thick reading of some images that have generated my own strong response.
Women's Camera Work is an attempt to understand the work photographs do in constructing histories. As I have suggested with the example of Migrant Mother, such constructions have to do not only with the art of making but with institutional practices, social contexts, the politics of circulation, and a wide variety of personal and public responses. Through the lens of contemporary cultural studies discourse, this narrative endeavors to critique influential male-centered historiography, to retrieve and rehearse the value of gender as an analytical category in photographic production, to exhibit the work itself and tell the absorbing story of the women who made it, to evaluate their distinct contributions in relation to constructions of Americanness and otherness, to discover the aesthetic and deconstructive power of close reading of certain images, and to learn to see what these women saw.
Self, body, other--including interconnecting constructions of gender, race, and class--these are the warp threads of a fabric whose woof threads are problems within particular photographic genres: images made by women Pictorialists who both worked within and departed from the conventions of the fine arts as defined by Alfred Stieglitz and his journal Camera Work and his gallery 291; "documents" of American Indians, African Americans, the poor; and representations of landscape as spacious and mythical as primeval monuments and as precise and intimate as the human body.
Chapter 1 explores the way in which makers, distributors, and readers of images construct histories, including the relationship between visual imaging and national culture, the representation of difference, and the creating of sub-versions. As a way of recovering photographic history and thinking about the cultural work that images do, and in opposition to the hierarchical line of male photographers descending from Stieglitz (or on the West Coast Edward Weston), I propose here the more amorphous structure of a network of women. This is not only my subject but a construct that gives shape to my narrative: a series of meditations that comprise a pattern of interwoven unsubordination. The net, in other words, functions as a discursive analogue.
Chapter 2 explores women's photographic networks in the period of the "coming-of-age" of photography--from 1890 to the First World War, coinciding approximately with both Camera Work and the Clarence H. White School of Photography. Women like Gertrude Käsebier, Imogen Cunningham, Laura Gilpin, Dorothea Lange, the major figures of this study, mentored and supported one another in important ways. Many of them shared a common rootedness in a significantly more open form of Pictorialism taught by Stieglitz's one-time collaborator and later rival, Clarence H. White, with whom Käsebier was associated and Gilpin and Lange studied. Entering the field coincidentally with the development of new modes of producing cheap paper, photoengraving and printing, these women joined photographic societies, published in photographic journals, exhibited at galleries, and contributed to the popular press. Many of them who, like Käsebier, were well educated and trained in painting turned to photography as a more effective means of developing an expressive language in their visual images. Although women worked in all photographic genres, their subjects were often (unlike their male counterparts who often favored allegorical representations of female nudes) friends and family members; rarely did women hire models. To examine their work--a trove of visual documentation of everyday life that makes a strong case for female agency in the making of (photographic) histories--is to understand the way in which personal and social experiences in this period led women to make visual choices contingent on contexts and relationships.
Picturing difference (as in the "otherness" of women's bodies) is, however, by no means peculiar to men. Pictorialist photography as practiced by both men and women was bound up from the beginning with representing exotic difference (13). The intertwined issues of class and gender--insofar as the distinction between middle-class women who took up the camera and the women who modeled nude for male photographers is concerned--was not one that women thought or wrote about, even though women did rise through the ranks, from receptionist or photo finisher to photographer. Specifically targeted by marketing strategies to take up the camera, their concern was to use their camera work as a legitimate way of claiming time and space of their own. Middle-class white women usually began by photographing the familiar. But they were also drawn to picturing what was strange--and here is where the issue of gender intersects with those of race and of class in complex ways. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 focus on this intersection and deal, respectively, with representations of American Indians, African Americans, Asian Americans, and the migrant poor.
Gertrude Käsebier, who would prove so strong a presence for the women photographers of this study, "documented" (the word used for Käsebier's work by her friend Frances Benjamin Johnston) a great range of Americans who came to her Fifth Avenue studio in New York, including a group of American Indians, traveling with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Käsebier claimed an affinity for these "red" men, women, and children because of her own Western origins, and her mode of representation would at first present a model for her younger Colorado colleague, Laura Gilpin. Preserving the empathic relationship between sitter and subject she had learned from her mentor, Gilpin, however, would, discard her soft-focus lens and ultimately move away from an artful picturing of American Indians. Her mature work, particularly The Enduring Navaho, is distinctly her own, and strikingly at variance with most visual records of a "vanishing race." This difference, I argue here, has a great deal to do with gender, not only in terms of public support or its lack, but also in terms of the life experience of the photographer.
Many women whose camera work might not otherwise have been published and exhibited were supported by Käsebier and especially by Johnston, who celebrated their achievements in a series of articles for the Ladies' Home Journal and at the Paris Exposition in 1900--where Johnston's own Hampton Institute series won a Grand Prix. These pictures of the of a white, middle-class "Progressive" institution's reformist attempts to remake the Other in its own image are complicated, I suggest, by Johnston's gendered response to her subject matter. This is the subject of Chapter 4 and includes, in addition to Johnston's work, that of Doris Ulmann, another Clarence White student, and Consuelo Kanaga. Ulmann is best known for her pictures of Appalachian rural culture, in which she seems to have achieved a rapport with the "folk" in Kentucky and Tennessee, who often recreated tableaux from the past for her camera. My interest, however, is in her relatively unknown photographs of Gullah Negroes for Julia Peterkin's Roll, Jordan, Roll, a less successful but more interesting project because of strategies of resistance demonstrated by her subjects. Consuelo Kanaga, a friend of Cunningham and of Lange, worked both in art photography and photojournalism and had ties to the West and East Coasts. From her early days in Paris when she discovered African sculpture to her work with the leftist Photo League in New York, she was attracted to black subjects, photographing them, she claimed, as a mode of self-exploration.
As I have suggested in my discussion of Lange's Migrant Mother, FSA images have been, and continue to be read in disparate, even contradictory ways. Susan Sontag, for example, has argued that the artistic preconceptions of FSA photographers, who took dozens of frontal pictures of their sharecropper subjects until they got just the right look--"the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry"--override and thus negate the reality, and the validity, of their subject. While there are reasons to see the FSA images as a body of camera work (photographers operated under Stryker's direction; he kept the "good" negatives and punched holes in others, wrote the "shooting scripts" and distributed the pictures), there are significant grounds for differences among them as well. Andrea Fisher locates these differences in gender: the FSA photographs by men, she contends, exhibit a kind of unity, a frontality that connotes direct and immediate presence, whereas those by women--through complex poses, evocative, directional lighting--arrest, unsettle, and provoke disparate responses (14) . I find Fisher's distinctions between women and men suggestive but finally troubling. I am more interested here in exploring questions of visibility and invisibility (Lange's self-descriptive terms), of distance and proximity; in questions of power--inherent in the gaze of those who see and implement policy--and powerlessness, as those who are represented bear its consequences. Chapter 5 focuses on the way in which Lange's work for the FSA and the War Relocation Authority (WRA) confounds these categories of self and other.
It is no coincidence that bodies and land were both objects of the colonial gaze and subjects of high art in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is no accident that as Pictorial photographers, eager for acceptance of their work on aesthetic grounds, turned to that other great subject of Western art, the landscape, "documentary" photographers in the United States went West to record visually new land claims. Like the railroad, which allowed Whitman and his fellow travelers to see "distances joined like magic," the camera was an active agent in the process of turning nature into culture (15). Landscape was a subject to which women photographers came late not only for practical reasons--heavy equipment, arduous travel conditions--but because in the tradition of the genre, they--their bodies--are the subject. Anne Brigman, working at the turn of the century, tackled this problem, Symbolist-fashion, by turning her camera on her self in her "visualization of the human form as part of tree and rock rhythms (16)." Cunningham's California pictures of peopled places and her sensual photographs of plants in her garden in various stages of growth offer an obvious comparison with the precisionist photographic landscapes of her male contemporaries, particularly Edward Weston. A sentient physical world, Cunningham's primary interest, was also Gilpin's subject for most of her long career. Gilpin's sense of place--her photographic record of the Southwest--differs markedly from that of both male travelers who recorded their impressions of vast tracts of unpeopled spaces and Anglo-European women who journeyed west with their husbands carrying seeds, root cuttings, and scraps of fabric from home to recreate in the wilderness the familiar gardens of their eastern places. In the most empty vista, Gilpin sensed a history, a presence, or what she called the spirit of place--by which she meant the indigenous history and peculiar geography of each locale. Her conception of place as feminine and maternal, which is to some extent shared by Brigman and Cunningham, is tied to a sense of the land that is not merely a "scape"--something viewed--but an inhabited place. Such a redefinition of "landscape" opens up the genre to a consideration of Lange's work in terms of the human histories embodied in particular places and in terms of the meaning of displacement.
The meditations in these chapters depend very much upon attempting to establish the broadest possible context--personal, social, artistic--for reading certain images. At the same time, the reading itself is highly interactive and depends upon selecting and ordering. Lange's Migrant Mother, can be placed beside that other famous suffering woman of the Depression, Walker Evans's "Annie Mae Gudger," or, more broadly, alongside a selection of other documents in the FSA files, such as those made by Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly Brannan in Documenting America, or by Andrea Fisher in Let Us Now Praise Famous Women. This reading thus shifts the argument from content--documentation of a specific historical period--to form--composition, technique, angle of vision. Lange, who argued that grouping photographs is a way of telling stories, created her own new context for this well-known image by placing it, in her retrospective exhibit, in a series of photographs spanning her career which she called The Last Ditch. Edward Steichen used Migrant Mother in his 1955 Museum of Modern Art exhibit The Family of Man as part of a mythic global village--in a section of nursing mothers and children that came to be called "Tits and Tots (17)." Or with the sort of imaginative history making practiced by a historian such as Simon Schama, one could use Lange's representation in an attempt to reconstruct the -subject's, Mrs. Florence Thompson's, own story (18). Such a narrative, pieced together through the lens of one's own viewing eye/I would be no less ingenious than one created by placing Lange's iconic image alongside Käsebier's The Manger and Gilpin's Navaho Madonna, Cunningham's Pregnant Woman and Kanaga's Black Madonna. To do so not only situates the image diahronically but also discovers unlikely likenesses across the lines of race and class in adding the elements of tableau vivant (Käsebier), in foregrounding the body (Cunningham, Gilpin) as a source of aliveness, in trying on the identity of the other (Kanaga). The imaginative narrative I have constructed derives from my own hard looking and also my own intuition, shaped, and fixed in time and place, by a particular configuration of historical conditions. Pattern, that is--the form and substance that give shape and meaning to my story--is, as in music, an invention spun on the ground of these visual images.

Notes

1. John Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling (New York: Pantheon, 1982), pp. 285-86.

2. John Berger and Jean Mohr demonstrate this in Another Way of Telling. Mohr asks nine people to respond to five of his photographs and records nine separate stories for each image, each different from what his own conception of "what was happening" (pp. 41-57). "Memory, based upon the visual, is freer than reason" (p. 133), Berger writes. "Memory is a field where different times coexist" (p. 280).

3. Roy Emerson Stryker and Nancy Wood, In This Proud Land: America, 1935-1943, As Seen in the FSA Photographs (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1974), p. 19. Lange recalled making five photographs, but she actually made six, all of which are reproduced in Lawrence W. Levine, "The Historian and the Icon: Photography and the History of the American People in the 1930s and 1940s," in Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly W. Brannan, eds., Documenting America: 1935-1943 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1988), pp. 16-17.

4. San Francisco News, March 10, 1936, cited in Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978), pp. 133-34.

5. "Please, mister," she wrote to Stryker's assistant Edwin Locke, in charge of the Washington lab, "this show is the most important photographic show we have. It tours the country. It tours Europe. I couldn't afford to show prints unsigned, which I have not even seen. I'll send the negatives right back." Dorothea Lange to Edwin Locke, Sept. 10, 1936. Cited in Meltzer, Dorothea Lange, p. 134.

6. George P. Elliott, "Things of This World," Commentary (December 1962): 542; Dorothea Lange [ex. cat.], with an introduction by George P. Elliott (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), p. 7.

7. Dorothea Lange, "The Assignment I'll Never Forget: Migrant Mother," Popular Photography (February 1960): 42-43, 126.

8. Margery Mann, "Dorothea Lange," Popular Photography (March 1970): 84.

9. Willa Cather, "The Best Short Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett" (1925), in Stephen Tennant, ed., Willa Cather on Writing (New York: Knopf, 1949), pp. 47-59. There are many similarities between Käsebier and Cather: both moved to the western territories as children with mothers who followed adventurous husbands but were never quite comfortable on the frontier; both traveled to France, took their first lessons from male masters, and in their early work thought of artistic expression in early work in terms of male masterpieces-- in Käsebier's case, Renaissance and Impressionist portraits and symbolist "paintings". Like Cather, Käsebier referred to the process of finding her own voice as "simplifying" and of finding her way back to the remembering of the early influence of a strong woman, her grandmother. Käsebier would be for Gilpin the kind of mentor Jewett was for Cather.

10. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), pp. 17-18, cited in Carol Shloss, In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer, 1840-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 6.

11. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p.285.

12. See Shloss, In Visible Light, pp. 10, 13, 261.

13. Documenting other races and classes with the camera began with the invention of photography. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz commissioned daguerreotypes of African slaves to study race difference. In chapters 3 and 5, I take up the way in which, in the early twentieth century, such projects were bound up with the new field of anthropology (Edward Curtis's colossal project of photographing the "vanishing race" of North American Indians being the most spectacular example) and with politics, particularly those projects associated with New Deal programs of the 1930s.

14. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1973), p. 6; Andrea Fisher, Let Us Now Praise Famous Women: Women Photographers for the US Government 1935 to 1944 (London: Pandora [Routledge & Kegan Paul], 1987), p. 103; Shloss, In Visible Light, p. 12.

15. Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, cited in Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825-1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 175. On the connection between the conquest of foreign lands and the colonial gaze that focused upon women's bodies as objects of that conquest see Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

16. Cited in Therese Thau Heyman, Anne Brigman: Pictorial Photographer/ Pagan/ Member of the Photo-Secession [exhibit catalog] (Oakland, Calif.: Oakland Museum, 1974), p. 3.

17. Kathleen Newton Haven, staff assistant to Edward Steichen from 1953 to 1955, interview with Milton Meltzer, May 3, 1976, cited in Meltzer, Dorothea Lange, p. 295.

18. See chapter 5 for a discussion of the "real" Florence Thompson. Any reconstruction of her own story, of which we have so little information, would necessarily be an imaginative reconstruction.