2020 Pub West Design Bronze Award for Photography winner

Recover the stories of long-overlooked American women who, at a time when women rarely worked outside the home, became commercial photographers and shaped the new, challenging medium. The first book to focus exclusively on this era of American women photographers, primary sources and new materials offer detailed portraits of two generations of enterprising women. The featured photographers worked in large cities to small towns across the US, and their profiles go beyond a broad survey, covering why they entered the medium, the details of running their own studios, and their visual output. Divided into chapters by subject, including family photography, Civil War soldier portraits, and landscape photography, the photos include daguerreotypes, tintypes, carte de visite, and more. This welcome resource fills in gaps in photographic, American, and women's history and convincingly lays out the parallels between the growth of photography as an available medium and the late-19th-century women's movement.
144 pages | Hardcover