Carrie Mae Weems. Untitled (Woman and Daughter with Make-Up), 1990; silver gelatin print, black and white; 10.24 x 10.24 in. Courtesy of Haverford College, Haverford PA.

Centered on the premise of female photography from the past 150 years, the show yields an interesting spectrum of established, canonical artists aside mid-career artists such as Rachel Papo and Jessica Todd Harper as well as those known better for photojournalism, like Sue Sojourner-Lorenzi. The question figuratively hanging in the brightly lit atrium is: What does it mean for a woman to look at something, and to record her observations? Does she impart her supposed womanliness onto said views, and if so, how would we know? Given the historicity of the exhibition, it’s impossible not to imagine the constraints women photographers faced, as well the freedom a lens might grant.

There is a raw intimacy prevalent in the selected works, which is played up through their close vicinity in the salon-style installation. To the left of the entrance is perhaps the boldest section—though the individual works are modest in scale—which leads with Arbus’ Albino Sword Swallower at a Carnival (1970). The grayscale silver gelatin print depicts a woman of indeterminate age, in layers of richly textured clothing, arms spread Jesus-style with half an ornate sword down her throat. With a backdrop of a dark, billowing tent, one can imagine the performed act as a personal favor to Arbus, part-braggadacio, part-trust fall; a secret exchange behind the carnival scenery.

Susan Meiselas. Wedding, El Salvador, 1983; silver gelatin print; 11.9
by 17.7 in. Courtesy of Haverford College, Haverford, PA.

The walls are crowded, which imparts an odd hierarchy of vision in which the most sensational works (the Sword Swallower’s Christ-on-the-cross pose), as well as the extremely reticent in subject matter, jump out of the mostly black-and-white collection. One piece that fulfills both extremes is Sailor and Girl (1940) by the inimitable Lisette Model. Here, Model has caught the breath before romantic intimacy, the girl demure, with eyes downcast and a smile playing at the edge of her lips; a flower in her coiffed hair and eyebrows drawn on like razors heighten the mid-century glamour. The sailor moves in, eyebrows furrowed and mouth slightly parted. How Model got in this close with a camera is astonishing—the distance was probably only about two feet, the girl’s cigarette foregrounded as to almost break the frame. The curious part is the role Model must have played in the social scene: immersed but with arms raised, eyes open, catching the heart that shines through the sly debauchery of her subject matter.

In the far corner of the space are Susan Meiselas’ Wedding, El Salvador (1983) and Helen Levitt’s Mother and Child, N.Y.C. (c. 1930). As with many of the works here, the subject matter is domestic—even ritualistic. Susan Meiselas, a Magnum documentary photographer and MacArthur fellow, presents the first dance of a newly married couple, the bride bedecked in white lace and the groom having the air of someone who hates to dance. A row of bored children slump against an older woman behind the couple, while to their right a very pregnant guest sits staring at them, foreshadowing their next step in life. But at this moment in time, the bride and groom stare off in opposite directions, waiting for the spotlight to dim. This scene is a small familial respite in Meiselas’ politically charged series El Salvador. Training of Atlacati Battalion hangs above Helen Levitt’s urban mise-en-scène of an African American mother in a housedress gesturing to her child, old enough to be walking but young enough to unspecified in gender, on the steamy concrete of New York City streets. These two black-and-white silver gelatin prints, both only eleven by thirteen inches, seem intrusive yet welcoming. A wedding is public presentation of an ostensibly private decision, while the intimacy of mother and child plays out on the stage of a city sidewalk. These photographs function as traces of an undoubtedly subjective, even implicit, witness.

Helen Levitt. Mother and Child, N.Y.C., c. 1930; gelatin silver print, black-and-white; 11 x 13.8 in. Courtesy of Haverford College, Haverford, PA.

All of this historicizing demands a look forward, provided in one of the (oddly unnecessary) vitrines of the exhibition. Deana Lawson’s Coulson Family (2008) is small—seven-and-one-half by ten inches—but the questions of composure and assembled identity it raises makes it seem more expansive. An African American mother sits with crossed ankles between her two young sons. In stiffly pressed Sunday best, they pose dutifully for the camera; the younger boy smiles adorably with his hands behind his back. Behind is a cobalt-blue faux Christmas tree, adorned with gold and white tinsel, and the walls of the living room rise up in a cerulean wash. Stacks of DVDs in the entertainment center to their left support a mantle of wood-framed photographs, angled jauntily. The image is both familiar and posed. Deana Lawson, one of the youngest artists in the exhibition, is known for her visual exploration of black culture, of what it means to take on an identity and perform it, of what performativity means in larger social systems.

The other “women photographers” here are also performing roles. In this exhibition, the position of the photographer is also constructed: She is an inside outsider, and the subject as well as the image maker; she explores the duplicitous nature of the photograph itself, a representation of a moment irretrievably gone and a promise of new modes of perception to come. As illuminating as this exhibition is, I look forward the end of these gender-specific shows—when we can just say photographers, and artists, as sex disappears from its supposed role as a pre-determinant of subject and style.

The Female Gaze: A Survey of Photographs by Women from the 19th to 21st Centuries is on view at the Atrium Gallery at Haverford College through November 30, 2014.

Nan Goldin, Nan and Brian in bed, New York City, 1983; detail from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency; 1979-1996; nine-carousel projection with approximately 700 slides, soundtrack, and titles; dimensions variable; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; © Nan Goldin; image: courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

Bean Gilsdorf: Exposed was ten years in the making. How and why did it begin?

Sandra Phillips: I did a show called Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence about twelve years ago because I was very interested in the fact that we ascribe a certain amount of authority to photographs as impartial truth-telling documents. But they can be extremely ambiguous. And it occurred to me that there was another aspect that was about making pictures without people knowing that they were being photographed. There are, in fact, some spy pictures in this show. So that’s how I started.

BG: Did your organization of this show start with any particular pieces? Or was it just a general concept?

SP: It started as an idea, and the beginning of it was looking at the work of Edgar Degas, believe it or not! He was very interested in photography and he made a lot of photographs. He made pictures of his models that he arranged, but they were presented as though they were spied on. I thought that was completely fascinating—why would someone as important as he be interested in the use of photography as a spying medium? It had to do with his own personal aesthetic, but once you get started in that, then you realize how amazingly broad this topic is.

Garry Winogrand, New York, 1969; gelatin silver print; 11 x 14 in. (27.94 x 35.56 cm); Collection SFMOMA, fractional and promised gift of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein; © Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

SP: I also looked at the work of Helen Levitt, and she was interested in making pictures of people who didn’t realize that they were being photographed. So all of a sudden, this idea expanded: how do you explain street photography without actually dealing with the surveillance aspect of it? And then it became a very big subject: it wasn’t only street photography, it’s the ways we look at sex, the ways we understand important people, and then this weird territory where people like celebrities are being aggressively looked at. What does that mean to us as a culture? Where does this come from? Examining the interest that we have in violence is a necessary part of modern life. And the contemporary photographs are all about surveillance, obviously.

BG: Do you think there’s any correspondence between the gesture of taking a photograph of someone who is not looking, and staging a photograph to appear as though someone is not looking?

SP: …Oh, yeah…

BG: I’m thinking of all the Facebook photos—those self-portraits—where people specifically look away from the camera as though they had been caught unawares. What do you think is behind that?

SP: It’s an affect, that we want to be photographed as though it’s real, but it’s actually not real. I think this is the big issue now in photography, whether it’s staged or isn’t staged. It comes back to the idea of photography being a medium of truth telling. It’s a very interesting medium; it seems absolutely clear and yet is so mysterious.

BG: I find it interesting that this exhibition came from England, where surveillance culture is just outrageous. Do you know what the reaction was, over there?

SP: It was tremendously interesting to the English for that very reason. The Tate is a much more public institution than almost any other institution in the world, it has millions of visitors a year. And I can’t remember how many millions of people came to see the show, but it was huge, there was a lot of discussion about it. There was another show about surveillance [Rhetorics of Surveillance: from Bentham to Big Brother at ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe] about ten years ago in Germany and it was very theoretical. But in England they have the whole craze, really, for outfitting public spaces with surveillance cameras. There was a child in Scotland who was abducted and killed by two older kids, and that’s what started it all. It was before the al Qaida bombings, it was before all of that. It wasn’t political; the idea was purely to save children’s lives, that’s where it started.

Tazio Secchiaroli, Anita Ekberg and Husband Anthony Steel, Vecchia Roma, 1958; gelatin silver print; 11 11/16 x 14 5/8 in. (29.69 x 37.15 cm); Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; © Tazio Secchiaroli / David Secchiaroli.

BG: Which is different from what’s happening right now. On one hand we want to have our personal privacy—when we dictate it!—but on the other hand we want to look as though we’ve been caught on camera in some “real” moment. How do you tease those apart? It’s so complicated, this relationship that we have to an image of ourselves.

SP: Yes, it’s extremely strange.

BG: Are there any pieces in the exhibition that embody what you want people to take away from this?

SP: The Degas picture. And, obviously people like Weegee play an enormous role here. And there are certainly pictures that mean a lot to me. The early photograph by Paul Strand of the man who’s sitting on the sidewalk, a poor man, on the street in New York. He’s revealing his inner dislocation or inner anxiety…it’s a picture of someone’s raw psychological anxiety. It’s a very moving picture, done by a guy who was trying to learn about Cubism and elevate photography to a formalist practice. And, at the same time he’s making these pictures of very poor people on the streets without their knowledge of it. That, I would say, is a touchstone.

* * *

*Exposed was conceived by Sandra Phillips and co-curated with Tate curator of photography Simon Baker.