Breaking the Frame: Pioneering Women in Photojournalism

Breaking the Frame: Pioneering Women in Photojournalism celebrates six women: Therese Bonney, Olga Lander, Hansel Mieth, Grace Robertson, Esther Bubley, and Margaret Bourke-White. It focuses on their work from the 1930s to the mid-1950s, when each was at the peak of her creative power. For a curator and historian of photography, few things are more rewarding than introducing the work of a photographer lost to history, or inviting a deeper look into a career given only cursory attention. Two of the featured photographers-Therese Bonney and Olga Lander-are unknown in the larger circle of photography history; the present volume introduces a wider audience to their World War II images. The remaining photographers, with [the exception of Margaret Bourke-White, have had scant attention paid them in the last forty years. The idea for this book and exhibition began germinating when I first encountered the life and work of Therese Bonney in 2002; it continued through the discovery of the obscure or lost careers of other women photojournalists. That they are all women is significant. I mean to redress years of neglect, while considering whether women contribute something unique to the medium. I do not propose that women photograph in a particular way, with specific female visual tropes, but rather 1 want to examine whether women leave evidence of the feminine when they make photographs. Photo historian Eugenia Parry Janis considers this in terms of the "psychic privilege granted women since the beginning of time" and continues: "Women have helped show us that the camera can be made to yield images that nourish many conflicting desires of the unconscious mind, transport us beyond the confines of the document into more uncertain confrontations with possibility, and with facts' dark, secrets and terrible truths."