Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics

Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics makes the case for a feminist aesthetics in photography by analysing key works of twenty-two women photographers, including cis- and trans-woman photographers.

Claire Raymond provides close readings of key photographs spanning the history of photography, from nineteenth-century Europe to twenty-first century Africa and Asia. She offers original interpretations of well-known photographers such as Diane Arbus, Sally Mann, and Carrie Mae Weems, analysing their work in relation to gender, class, and race. The book also pays close attention to the way in which indigenous North Americans have been represented through photography and the ways in which contemporary Native American women photographers respond to this history.

Developing the argument that through aesthetic force emerges the truly political, the book moves beyond polarization of the aesthetic and the cultural. Instead, photographic works are read for their subversive political and cultural force, as it emerges through the aesthetics of the image.

This book is ideal for students of Photography, Art History, Art and Visual Culture, and Gender.

Introduction

1. Julia Margaret Cameron and Clementina Hawarden: Myths of Origin

2. After and in the Fracture: Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, and Surrealism

3. Truth in Photography: Dorothea Lange and Imogen Cunningham

4. Rough Street: Diane Arbus and Vivian Maier

5. Afterimages: Ana Mendieta and Francesca Woodman

6. Performances: Nan Goldin, Nikki Lee, Catherine Opie, and Zackary Drucker

7. Carrie Mae Weems and Sally Mann: The Original Experience

8. Ethnographies and Portraits: Mary Ellen Mark, Rineke Dijkstra, Zoe Strauss

9. Aida Muluneh and Lalla Essaydi: A History of Photography

10. Counterdiscourse, Seeing Anew: Rebecca Belmore and Matika Wilbur

Postscript

Exergue, on Dayanita Singh

Index

Claire Raymond teaches Art History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Francesca Woodman’s Dark Gaze: the Diazotypes and Other Late Works; Witnessing Sadism in Texts of the American South; and Francesca Woodman and the Kantian Sublime. Her research focuses on aesthetics, poetics, and the intersections of cultural trauma and representation.