The National Gallery in Washington, D.C., has recently opened a major exhibition celebrating significant 20th century women photographers.  As curator Andrea Nelson explains, The New Woman Behind the Camera is intended to explore how photography became “a global symbol of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art.”

The phrase “New Woman” first appeared in the 1890s and became a cultural by-word for independent women tossing aside their corseted lives. Instead of serving as a mere appendage to he-who-ruled, the New Woman embraced education and headed to cities for new jobs created by modern life. They changed into sportier clothes and rode the  “bicycle craze” sweeping America–an exuberant sport that conveyed the social mobility modern women craved.

But the idea of “New Woman” was more than a popular commercial image, and as doors opened to greater possibilities for women in the 20th century, photography beckoned. New opportunities were fueled by the social disruption of World War I and by the rise of such mass media as movies, radio, and magazines.  Featuring more than 120 international artists and over 200 photographs, The New Woman Behind the Camera  documents and portrays the changing role of women, notably in the mid-century decades from the 1920s to the 1950s.

National Gallery Curator Andrea Nelson’s interest was first sparked by the Ilsa Bing photographs in her museum’s collection. Bing was a German photographer known as “queen of the Leica” and was noted especially for her street scenes. From this beginning, Nelson began to think about the larger community of women photographers working at the same time–and discovered they were vastly unheralded, including by academics and curators working in the modern period.

Photography won enormous popularity in the first half of the 20th century. The advent of lightweight cameras like the Leica made taking photographs accessible to more people, and the rise of the “Picture Press” tsunami of newspapers and magazines created a huge demand for photographic images. Curator Nelson, along with co-curator Mia Fineman of the Metropolitan Museum, wanted to broaden the history of modern photography by spotlighting exceptional women photographers from around the world—all of whose work captured the “realities of modernism.”

The exhibition is divided into thematic sections, beginning with “Self-Portraits” that introduce the women in their roles as professional artists.  Alma Levinson (above) portrays her image by displaying her camera, while Claude Cahum shows her face and its mirror reflection.

Another gallery focuses on how commercial studios became an entry point for many women, first through hand-colored prints and retouched negatives, and then by women opening their own studios. Gertrude Kasebier was first mentored by Alfred Stieglitz, but struck out on her own and earned Stieglitz’s disgust when she opened a commercial studio: yes, art was important, but Kasebier needed to make money. She became a mentor herself to such important photographers as Imogene Cunningham.

One gallery explores how “The City” was a major draw for women, with small cameras like the Leica able to capture the dynamism of street life scenes. It was a new world for the New Woman, and they reveled in depicting the  city’s modern–and liberating–energy.  The exhibition has important photographs by such well-known city artists as Berenice Abbott, but also shows remarkable images by lesser-known photographers like Hildegard Rosenthal, who fled the Nazis in 1937 and immigrated to Brazil. Her “Street Scene, Sao Paulo” is especially resonant.

Women photographers also explored the avant-garde nature of photography, experimenting with extreme close-ups, long exposure times, collage, and dizzying angles.  Olive Cotton created an utterly charming montage called “Teacup Ballet,” in which she organized a series of tea cups with their handles arranged like a corps de ballet. Another fascinating photograph is Vera Gabrielova’s “Untitled (Spoons).”

The gallery devoted to “Fashion and Advertising” reflects the vast demand for photographs created by the rise of print culture between the wars.  Some of these photographers are well-known, such as Louise Dahl-Wolfe, who was the head of photography at Harper’s Bazaar  from 1936-1958. Other women photographers found their niche showcasing celebrity culture in Hollywood.  Ruth Harriet Louise became head of MGM’s photo department from 1925-1930, and created iconic glamour photographs of such golden age stars as Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and Clark Gable.

Reaching far and wide to reflect photography’s social and cultural range, the exhibition has galleries devoted to “Ethnography” and “New Concepts of the Body in Modernity.”   Major sections also showcase “Social Documentary” and “Reportage,” featuring headliners like Margaret Bourke-White at LIFE Magazine, and Dorothea Lange’s Depression photographs for the Farm Securities Administration. The exhibition also includes Lange’s photographs documenting the life of Japanese Americans living at War Relocation camps after Pearl Harbor.

A few women photographed World War II, and Lee Miller captured the horrors of concentration camps after they were liberated by American troops at the end of the war.  There are also haunting images of Hiroshima’s bombed devastation by Japanese photographer Tsuneko Sasamoto.

As Oscar Wilde once said, “The one duty we owe history is to rewrite it,” and THE NEW WOMAN BEHIND THE CAMERA is a major realignment of how we view photography in the 20th century. While some names were famous in their own time—notably Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Lee Miller—most of the women celebrated in this exhibition are not familiar. Curator Nelson and her team have brilliantly revealed why their works deserve recognition.

By Amy Henderson, Contributing Editor
                                                                                 
THE NEW WOMAN BEHIND THE CAMERA will be at the National Gallery through January 30, 2022. A catalogue of the same title is available at NGA.GOV.