Exhibit of the week: Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Through March 21, 2011

“If a museum tried to narrate the entire history of painting, sculpture, or architecture using only work by women,” it wouldn’t be able to, said Ariella Budick in the Financial Times. For most of history, societal norms prevented women from practicing those art forms at a high level. But “photography is different”: Its 170-year history has overlapped with a period of unprecedented social progress for women. Female photographers were active in all of the medium’s important aesthetic movements, and the Museum of Modern Art’s new exhibition has no problem tracing photography’s development solely through their work. “Even so, many of the names in the MoMA show are unfamiliar,” since these women were often overshadowed by male artists “who enjoyed more fame, though not always greater talent.”

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Consider Gertrude Käsebier, a late-Victorian photographer who was “first extolled and then disparaged by the almighty Alfred Stieglitz,” said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. Her gauzy mother-and-child tableaux were founding works of pictorialism. In art like hers and Julia Margaret Cameron’s, “we see the world through a kind of romantic humidity, a softening haze.” By the early 20th century, photographers had rejected such sentimentality, producing crisp, “razor-sharp” images, like Margaret Bourke-White’s industrial scenes and Tina Modotti’s “still life of bullets.” As the show moves through the decades, we see Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era “migrant mothers and ruined daughters,” Helen Levitt’s street photography, and Diane Arbus’ portraits of society’s outsiders. Unfortunately, the sheer variety of styles means “you’re basically left to extract guiding themes of your own.”

“So what, exactly, distinguishes photographs made by women as opposed to men?” said Philip Gefter in TheDailyBeast.com. In terms of quality, nothing. In terms of subject matter, however, the artists represented here do provide special insight into women’s changing lives over the past century and a half. By the 1980s, a generation of photographers deeply influenced by feminist politics had come of age: Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, and others subjected the work of male predecessors to a “rigorous, necessary, and unforgiving” critique, showing how it frequently exploited female subjects. At the time, the Museum of Modern Art’s own photography department was vilified “for defining the canon as testosterone-based.” Now MoMA has made amends with an exhibition definitively proving that the best work of female photographers “constitutes an alternate canon, one every bit as vital, lyrical, experimental,” and significant as the male-dominated one.