Video presentation of sister women photography collectives & organizations.

Featured videos showcase WOPHA’s sister photography collectives and organizations on the voice of their founders and members, explaining its origins, mission, and support for this inaugural convening. Among the presented organizations are Fast Forward: Women in Photography, MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, Foto Féminas, Mulheres Luz, and many others. These videos provide an insider’s look into international women and non-binary like-minded collaborative projects reframing the dominant narratives of photography history.

How did Goshka Macuga change the intent of one of Andre Malraux’s most enduring images? What do Anna Atkins, Ovular photographers, and Carmen Winant have in common? Why did artists from Hannah Höch to Deborah Roberts choose photomontage as a strategy of representation? Women’s early engagement with and access to photography (gained by virtue of the medium’s own marginality within the arts) articulates a perceptive link between progressive politics and innovative aesthetics and an expanded concept of what an artist can be. Photography’s medial ubiquity also proffers new possibilities for offsetting the aura attributed to the original, its ideals of uniqueness, specificity, and integral knowledge, actualizing art’s sense of itinerancy, its multiple lives, and ethics of restitution.

This nonlinear presentation focuses on a cross-generational group of artists whose discourses of resistance and pursuits on the fringes of modernism ultimately defined that period and reshaped the future as much, if not more, than the activities taking place at its center. Their entangled and intersectional artistic strategies—ranging from visual montage and performative modes of self-portraiture to non-binary models of authorship and the reclamation of image legacies that have been muted—offer a mediation on history as a relational and projective process.

This panel places women, in all the complex iterations and intentions of that word, in photography’s history and practice. How can and how do women remember, photographically, themselves and each other? Abigail Solomon-Godeau interrogates the relationship between the imputation of narcissism with which women who look at themselves are charged and the ability of women photographers to change the photographic canon, its history and its future. Elizabeth Ferrer, deploying critical theory and aesthetic practice, inserts Latinx women photographers into the photographic canon from which they have been largely erased. In these reinsertions, of self-seeing, of diasporic, Indigenous, and Latinx identities rising, moving beyond coloniality’s regimes, feminist photography becomes itself.

What if this poem had no picture? Because its main protagonist is buried under layers of historic invisibility, colonial dust, and genealogical abyss. This poetic performance by Simone Lagrand is a tribute to ancestors who don’t have surnames and sometimes don’t even have a name. How did they look like? How to honor them so that they are never forgotten?

This program is presented in partnership with Villa Albertine and the French Embassy in the United States.

This lecture presents a select group of women photographers of the African diaspora working in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries whose works critically analyze and locate the Black female body in contemporary art and in historical images in order to frame new identities. Drawing from her work as a photographer and that of other women artists, Deborah Willis addresses the relationship of the camera to the self and asks how photography, in its capacity to return the gaze, allows us to understand and alter identity, instating social and aesthetic voice to diasporic women.

Video presentation of sister women photography collectives & organizations.

Featured videos showcase WOPHA’s sister photography collectives and organizations on the voice of their founders and members, explaining its origins, mission, and support for this inaugural convening. Among the presented organizations are Fast Forward: Women in Photography, MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, Foto Féminas, Mulheres Luz, and many others. These videos provide an insider’s look into international women and non-binary like-minded collaborative projects reframing the dominant narratives of photography history.

Taking as a point of departure Alpesh Patel’s research on productive failure and queer creative practices, this conversation highlights the pioneering photographic work of Carlotta Boettcher. Her series San Francisco Urban Portraits evidence how, in the early 70s, the concepts of family, identity, gender, and sexual orientation were renegotiated and recreated by the emergence of a new sense of community.

This program is presented thanks to generous support from Arts Connection Foundation.

An heiress demands the restitution of the daguerreotype of her enslaved ancestor from the museum that preserves his captive image; a Tzotzil artist photographs objects, knowledges, and practices of her Indigenous community; a Greek-Armenian artist composes collages and film using found photographic and film materials produced by and for the United States and Western audiences. Resorting to the abolitionist imagination, decolonial approaches and methods, postcolonial theory, and feminisms, the presentations in this panel probe and interrogate the Archive as a space interconnected to racial capitalism, the establishment of settler-colonial states, and the sexual division of labor, from its very inception. If a practice is a provisional way of operating within dominant spaces, these archival, photographic, and artistic practices bring to the fore the notion that archival objects are not dead matter; on the contrary, they can—and should—be reactivated and potentialized in order to dismantle the Archive in its imperial form. The panel will include in-person and virtual presentations. It will be live-streamed on YouTube.

What are the challenges of curating and collecting women photographers’ work? In this panel, Karen Cordero explores strategies for activating archives containing works by women photographers from a feminist curatorial perspective, focusing on two particular cases that draw on her curatorial, pedagogical experience in Mexico with the exhibitions Mujeres… ¿y qué más?: Activando el archivo Ana Victoria Jiménez (2011) and Autorretrato con consciencia: Mujeres, género y feminismos en el archivo del Consejo Mexicano de Fotografía (2021).

Following an ongoing series by Shanghai-based artist Gao Ling and the work of the collective LING & COMMA (that she was a member of), Abby Chen highlights the importance of imagination to archiving and displaying Ling’s interdisciplinary practice, spanning live performance, online social media engagement, participatory street intervention, collaborative protest, and staged photography. Amelia Jones critically evidences the ways in which feminism can and must embrace a larger project beyond displaying the work of women artists—by examining the process of curating the live art and queer performance of artist Ron Athey. Defining feminist curating as a form of activism, these presentations compel us to displace the focus of attention from the images to the social interactions and the creative process itself.

The panel will include in-person and virtual presentations. It will be live-streamed on YouTube.

Video presentation of sister women photography collectives & organizations.

Featured videos showcase WOPHA’s sister photography collectives and organizations on the voice of their founders and members, explaining its origins, mission, and support for this inaugural convening. Among the presented organizations are Fast Forward: Women in Photography, MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, Foto Féminas, Mulheres Luz, and many others. These videos provide an insider’s look into international women and non-binary like-minded collaborative projects reframing the dominant narratives of photography history.

Nadia Huggins was born in Trinidad and Tobago and is based in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. A self-taught photographer, she has built a body of images that is characterized by her observation of the everyday. Her work merges documentary and conceptual practices, which explore belonging, identity, and memory, through a contemporary approach focused on representing Caribbean landscapes and the sea.