Women in the Dark: Female Photographers in the US 18501900

About this book

The hidden histories of two generations of women photographers in 19th-century America 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. Covering two generations of photographers ranging from New York City to Californias mining districts this study goes beyond a broad survey and explores individual careers through primary sources and new materials. Profiles of the photographers animate their careers by exploring how they began the details of running their own studios and their visual output. The featured photos vary in formdaguerreotype tintype carte de visite and moreand subject including Civil War portraits postmortem photography and landscape photography. This welcome resource fills in gaps in photographic American and womens history and convincingly lays out the parallels between the growth of photography as an available medium and the late-19th-century womens movement.