In New York, the Women Behind the Lens Step Into the Frame

For a few months this summer, some of photography’s greatest hits are converging in New York, from an 1864 albumen print by Julia Margaret Cameron subtitled ‘my first success’ to a Civil War-era photograph by Emma I. Kemp to the subversive works of Diane Arbus. Three exhibitions—at the Morgan Library, the Met and the Park Avenue Armory—trace the work of these and other pioneering women who helped shape photography as an art form.

Many are unaware that photography emerged at a time when women had greater mobility, opportunities and autonomy than they’d ever had in Western society. Cameras were easily obtained, simple to operate and relatively affordable. The advent of the daguerreotype and the series of technologies that followed it created a rare playing field for women, and they stepped up to the photographic plate with determination.

In 1839, Louis Daguerre unveiled a machine that captured images using light, silver, glass and life. Before the year was out, travelers were recording amazing sights from around the world, and average people could hold likenesses of themselves in their hands. Daguerreotypes changed the world, but the world is always changing, and it wasn’t long before new things came along. Ambrotypes, tintypes, cyanotypes and finally paper prints made image making even easier, more affordable and more accessible.

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In 1880, Eastman Kodak introduced its new camera, the Kodak No. 1, which came pre-loaded and ready to take a hundred pictures. George Eastman, a savvy businessman, heavily marketed it to women in a campaign featuring “Kodak Girls,” active young women dressed elegantly with little box cameras hanging from their necks. The thinking was that women were the keepers of family histories; they would want a way to record events. And he wasn’t wrong.

But it wasn’t long before women decided to do other things. In the first years of the 1900s, Jessie Tarbox Beals, who’d won a camera by selling magazine subscriptions, hoisted hers up a stepladder to photograph street scenes in New York. She became the first professional photojournalist for an American newspaper.

Imogen Cunningham, along with Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and four other photographers, formed the f/64 group and convinced curators at San Francisco’s M.H. de Young Memorial Museum that photographs belonged on museum walls. She stated that “photography is … a craft or trade to which both sexes have equal rights” in her 1913 essay Photography as a Profession for Women. It encouraged women to set up home-based studios, as she had at age 27, so they could raise children and run a business. Cunningham herself had found inspiration in the women photographers who preceded her, stating that there had been “no one better” than Julia Margaret Cameron at creating photographic portraits.

“Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron,” at the Morgan Library

Julia Margaret Cameron was 48 years old when she got her first camera. Her children were grown. Her time was more her own, and she had always had a creative nature. Over a little more than a decade, she produced thousands of exposures and altered the art form irrevocably. “Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron,” which comes to the Morgan Library and Museum after a stint at the Milwaukee Art Museum, brings together some 120 of her works chronicling her years of production. When the emphasis was on perfect focus and crisp outlines, Cameron ignored critics and followed her own vision to produce softly focused, dreamy portraits and narrative scenes. She refused to see the camera as just a mechanical device and approached photography as an art form.

“She accepted or even really embraced technical flaws, when other photographers would consider it a failure,” Allison Pappas, assistant curator of photography at the Morgan Library and co-curator of the exhibition, told Observer. “She certainly was interested in what we might call painterly images, though she would have thought of her work as being literary or allegorical or theatrical… to our eyes, a lot of her subjects may seem like they’re in everyday garb, but the fact that she was showing women with their hair down and uncovered was actually very unusual at the time and took them out of an everyday status.”

In Victorian England, photography was something of a fad. “The upper-class, aristocrats and the folks in that community, men and women, I think, all experimented with photography,” Pappas said, adding that the new medium, lacking centuries of preconceived notions of who could or couldn’t achieve mastery, left an unusual opening. “I think that when photography was still defining itself as a medium, there was a lot of terrain for someone like Cameron to come in and make a splash.”

Cameron was exhibited, published and quite well-known in her lifetime, and the fact that she never fell into obscurity, according to Pappas, gives her a rare cachet in the history of the medium. “I think that most generations of photographers have seen her work and looked to it. We certainly have taken her as a sort of feminist photo icon.”

“The New Art: American Photography, 1839–1910” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Anna K. Weaver similarly rejected the accepted use of the medium, and her work, along with that of four other nineteenth-century female photographers, is currently at The Met. In the 1870s, Weaver opted not to evoke classical vistas or lofty personages, but instead, humble needlecrafts. She created embroidery-like images in a darkroom by placing ferns and plants directly on photographic paper and exposing them to light. Her 1874 piece Welcome looks like a hooked rug that spells out a warm sentiment, but look closer, and it’s a photogram.

Alice Austen’s Group on Petria, Lake Mahopac, from 1888, shows a group of men and women at rest, lakeside. They echo nearby photographs by Carleton E. Watkins, just as Elisha Couchman’s 1864 portrait of a banjo player is similar to studio portraits by contemporary male photographers.

Two other women round out the small group included in the exhibition. Ellen M. Myers’ Juvenile Sand Hill Crane ca. 1880 and Emma I. Kemp’s Civil War Veteran George R. Shebbeard on a Perambulating Cot from 1892-94 couldn’t be more different. The only thing linking the photos is that women were behind the lens. Of the approximately 250 photographic images on display, 132—or more than half—are attributed to an “Unknown Maker.” It seems likely that some of those unknowns were women. As Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own expressed, “Anonymous, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

“Constellation” at Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall

Diane Arbus, after starting as a magazine photographer, ended up expressing one of the most individualistic sensibilities in twentieth-century art. “Constellation,” with some 450 works, offers a chance to wade through a sea of images unlike any other. From the 1950s until her death in 1971, Arbus took her hand-held camera from Central Park to Coney Island to circuses. Her focus often landed on gritty city dwellers and marginalized people. “I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them,” Arbus said.

Her pioneering work and uncritical gaze paved the way for later explorations of identity and lifestyle choices. The exhibition includes iconic works that picture crying babies, suburban boredom, cross-dressers and nudists. Arbus had a way of making average people look fraught or fantastical and lifting extraordinary subjects beyond the realm of judgment. She was the first American photographer to have work displayed at the Venice Biennale.

Though her vision and choices were distinctive, Arbus’ journey in photography was similar to that of many other women. She was highly educated and came from a wealthy family interested in the arts. She carved out time from housework for her career. And she had the encouragement of earlier women artists; Arbus studied with both Berenice Abbott and Lisette Model. Art historians discuss the work of later photographers like Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman as being prefigured by Arbus’ groundbreaking work.

Women photographers in the present and beyond

Creativity is one thing. Parity is another. While the work of women photographers continues to evolve and women make up more than half the professionals in the United States, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics cites a 20-40 percent pay gap compared to men. And according to a study by Fashionista Magazine, among 153 2017 magazines from ten of the leading U.S. fashion publishers, only 13.7 percent of cover images were photographed by women. From the outset, women have given much to photography; photography has a long way to go in paying them back.

Pappas offers hope in counterbalance. “From the generation of curators where photography really began to develop more broadly as a museum subject, a very high percentage of those curators were women, at a higher degree perhaps than in other fields,” she said. “This was a medium that was not yet considered significant for the field of art history, and it was a field in which a lot of women ended up taking up the gauntlet and leading the way.”

“Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron” is on view at the Morgan Library and Museum through September 14, 2025. “The New Art: American Photography, 1839–1910” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 20, 2025. “Constellation” is on view at the Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall through August 17, 2025.