Writings

One question I often ask myself is, “ What kinds of photographs am I NOT seeing?”

When I asked myself, in the late 1970’s, “Where are the photographs made BY (not of) non-Westerners?”, the question led to six months of research in China, and the publication of my essay “Chinese Photography: Notes toward a Cross-Cultural Analysis of a Western Medium” (Afterimage, January 1982). My interest in non-Western photography and its place in photographic history continues into the present.

When I asked myself, “Why do I see so few photographs of upper class people?”, the question led to the publication in 1989 of my essay “Looking up at the Upper Class: the Photographs of Barbara P. Norfleet” (Exposure, Vol. 26, No. 2/3).

And when I asked myself, in the mid 1980’s, “Where can photographs of pregnant women be found, especially photographs that acknowledge its complexity?”, this question led to extensive research, and ultimately to the publication of the book Pregnant Pictures, co-authored with Laura Wexler (Routledge, 2000).  The book investigates how the meanings of photographs of pregnant women change across the domains of art photography, advertising, medical imaging, snapshots, instructional photography and magazine covers. It is a history of photographs of the pregnant body in the U.S. between the late 19th century and the end of the 20th century, and takes into account how both the absence and the presence of photographs influence public and private life. The book includes over 200 photographs – the most extensive and diverse collection of photographs of pregnancy to be found anywhere.

Such investigations of the relationship between photography and politics - in the broadest sense - led me to then explore photography’s relation to specific social and historical issues.

A local controversy in the 1990’s over the public display of photographs of LGBT families got me interested in the activist potential of family photographs. My essay “In Defense of Civil Rights: The Paradoxical Power of Family Photographs” explores this issue in relation to the work of the writer/photographer team Peggy Gillespie and Gigi Kaeser (Afterimage, winter 2003).

And my essay “Courage in the Face of History: Cross-Cultural Portraits” discusses the question of cultural survival in the aftermath of war. The essay looks at work by artists Delilah Montoya, Alma Lopez, Sheila Pinkel and Meridel Rubinstein, and was published in the book Masquerade: Women’s Contemporary Portrait Photography, ed. Kate Newton and Christine Rolph, IRIS International Centre for Women in Photography, 2003.