As the news cycle regularly demonstrates, the simple, quintessentially modern act of taking a photograph has now become a predominant way of subverting entrenched power. And female artists, often on the fringes of cultural society, have been using their cameras to do just that for well over 100 years. This is one of the provocative declarations made by Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists from Helen Kornblum, the Museum of Modern Art’s empowering new exhibit of work by female photographers from over 100 years and all around the globe.
“For me it was interesting to constantly ask the question what is a feminist picture, because I got so many answers,” exhibit curator Roxana Marcoci told the Guardian. In fact, Our Selves provides 90 answers to this question, ranging from Frances Benjamin Johnston’s 1899 photograph of young students in a penmanship class to Black photographer Carrie Mae Weem’s 1990s “kitchen table” series. Feminist pictures also look like queer photographer Catherine Opie’s work Angela Scheirl, which depicts the transgender artist Hans Scheirl years before he transitioned to male, and Native American Cara Romero’s Wakeah, a 2018 portrayal of her friend Wakeah Jhane in full tribal dress.
