Restoration Conversations: The New Woman behind the Camera

From the 1920s to the 1950s, women photographers changed history, by capturing it.

In this video, Restoration Conversations features exhibition curator Andrea Nelson, with ‘sights’ and insight from ‘The New Woman Behind the Camera’, an exhibition on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, following a 3-month stint at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (November 2021).

The exhibition showcases the talent of more than 120 photographers from 20 countries – including Italy, India, Japan, USA, France and Mexico – and exemplifies a period of newfound professional independence for women in a shifting century. As social and political change triggered the rise and fall of regimes around the world, the ‘new woman’ experienced growing freedom, and carved her place in the field of photojournalism. Labor protests and peace marches, air pilots and freed prisoners of war, these photographs are signs of their times.

Portraiture, still-life and self-representation also gained a new edge, as professionals like Tina Modotti, Wanda Wulz, Tsuneko Sasamoto, Homai Vyarawalla and Alma Lavenson explored a principle espoused by US photographer Dorothea Lange: ‘To be good, photographs have to be full of the world.’

Restoration Conversations sponsored by Calliope Arts
with presenter Linda Falcone