The New Woman behind the Camera, 1920-1950: Exhibition Practice and the Rewriting of Photo-History

A powerful expression of modernity, the New Woman of the 1920s is easy to recognize but hard to define. Hair bobbed and fashionably dressed, this iconic figure of the interwar years was omnipresent, whether splashed across the pages of newspapers and magazines or projected on the silver screen. Yet the New Woman was more than a marketable image. Viewed as a self-assured, cosmopolitan flapper, she was also a contested symbol of liberation from traditional gender roles who signaled a transnational desire for independence, agency, and influence. Often viewed exclusively in a western context, the cultural concept of the New Woman was in fact a global phenomenon. Yet how this new understanding of female identity affected the daily lives of women varied significantly from place to place. Set within this framework, I have organized an exhibition The New Woman Behind the Camera, 1920 – 1950, which takes a global approach to analyzing how women photographers shaped the unprecedented visual innovation and expansion of photography from the 1920s through the 1940s. Using my experience of developing an exhibition that takes a global perspective on the production of women photographers, my presentation will focus on how we might rethink the ways in which we write photo-history through exhibitions. How have exhibitions enabled a loss of understanding of women’s participation in photo-history and what can be changed? How can we rethink notions of influence through display strategies and what are the challenges of having this conversation in an art museum setting? Moreover, how do curators (and historians) discuss the past without physical evidence or objects to analyze and display?