Anne Maxwell – författare

This is the first book to examine the lives and works of women photographers active in the settler colonial nations of the Pacific Rim from 1857–1930. The few histories of women’s photography that have been written so far have been confined to developments in Britain, France, Germany and the USA, and have overwhelmingly focused on artistic photography, ignoring the whole area of commercial photography. Taking 12 case studies as representative of the many women who entered the profession between 1857 and 1930, this book deals with both early 20th-century artistic and ethnographic photography in the region and 19th-century commercial photography. In addition to asking how female photographers coped with the pressure of being women in a male-dominated profession, what was new about the techniques and methods they deployed, and the kinds of artistic visions they brought to bear on their subjects, it breaks new ground by asking how they responded as photographers to the on-going decimation and displacement of indigenous peoples as white settlement and capitalism became ever more entrenched across the new world territories of the Pacific Rim, and photography more influenced by the international art movements of Pictorialism and Modernism.

This is the first book to examine the lives and works of women photographers active in the settler colonial nations of the Pacific Rim from 1857–1930. The few histories of women’s photography that have been written so far have been confined to developments in Britain, France, Germany and the USA, and have overwhelmingly focused on artistic photography, ignoring the whole area of commercial photography. Taking 12 case studies as representative of the many women who entered the profession between 1857 and 1930, this book deals with both early 20th-century artistic and ethnographic photography in the region and 19th-century commercial photography. In addition to asking how female photographers coped with the pressure of being women in a male-dominated profession, what was new about the techniques and methods they deployed, and the kinds of artistic visions they brought to bear on their subjects, it breaks new ground by asking how they responded as photographers to the on-going decimation and displacement of indigenous peoples as white settlement and capitalism became ever more entrenched across the new world territories of the Pacific Rim, and photography more influenced by the international art movements of Pictorialism and Modernism.

Australian Women’s Historical Photography: Other Times, Other Views examines the photographs produced by six talented women photographers against the historical backdrop of settler violence towards Indigenous Australians, the First Women’s Movement, the Great War of 1914–1918, Australia’s imperial occupation of New Guinea, the final years of Chinese Nationalist Party rule in China and debates about photography’s status as an art form. Women’s works from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been down-played or even ignored in existing accounts of Australia’s cultural history, and this study is aimed at rectifying this situation. At the same time, the book demonstrates why amateur works are just as important as commercial works to our understanding of the past.● Methodologically, the book draws on scholarship from history, art history, anthropology, sociology, gender studies and cultural studies to create an interdisciplinary critical framework that will be of interest to a broad range of academic and archival researchers. It is also a framework that is critically sensible of its own groundings in the postcolonial and feminist present thereby reflecting what is meaningful at any given historical moment.● Finally, this book responds to the pronounced lack of visibility of Australian realist, documentary and commercial women’s works. The few histories of Australian women’s photography that exist pay more attention to modernist and contemporary works, and when they do mention earlier women photographer’s works, they seldom go into much detail. They also ignore the works of the earliest Indigenous women photographers, women who traveled and made photographs abroad. By presenting a carefully contextualized and detailed study of works by six Australian women photographers who worked in the late colonial era and whose works in all sorts of small and surprising ways chronicled the impacts of some of the periods more disturbing as well as enlightened events, we will not only add to knowledge of Australian women’s photography, we will also broaden and enrich the frames of women’s photography and Australian history more generally.