Illuminations: Women Writing on Photography from the 1850s to the Present. - book reviews

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 1998 by Valerie Reardon

The introduction to Illuminations opens with the question: Why women? Why leave men out of this ample and capacious selection? The irony is that men are very much present in so far as they are the focus of most of the writing; and ample and capacious are the kinds of words Oscar Wilde would have used to caricature a dowager's bosom. To invoke a female body (women's writing) while simultaneously disowning it (a dowager's bosom) feels like fear of the all- powerful phallic mother and the result is a rather flawed and muddled volume.

The justification for the book is that histories of photography - like most (his)stories - proceed in orderly, coherent ways only by virtue of violent exclusions. It is, of course, the other excluded stories of race, class, culture and gender that recent decades of critical theory have sought to recuperate. The prospect of many different narratives claiming the truth could, however, result in the anxious absence of a single definitive history. In these post-feminist days, in which women's rights are simply taken for granted, it is presumably necessary to just add a few stories but basically leave the main narrative intact.

Illuminations is another of the "redress the balance" genre - a trawl through the archives using the keywords "Women" and "Photography." The intended audience for the anthology is unclear, for most of the essays of interest to people working in the field have already been published in other, quite widely circulated books, such as Richard Bolton's The Contest of Meaning (1989). A collection of 60 writings by women on photography that fills over 500 pages could be useful as a reference book, but there is too much dross to wade through and there are significant absences. The claim that this is a new and different history of photography - one in which women have "[intervened] in the key debates of the last century and a half" - as well as brief introductions frame each essay within a particular debate. However, more often than not, debate is too strong a word (discussion or even discourse would do) and exactly what it is that is at stake is never very clear. To regard all these writings as interventions is steep and only serves to demonstrate the emptiness that often lies at the heart of buzz words.

Notable exceptions are those essays that directly challenge established photography histories; these include Roberta McGrath's psychoanalytic reading of Edward Weston's nudes and Deborah Bright's critique of landscape photography, "Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men." McGrath demonstrates the ways in which Weston's practice enabled him to realize his sexual fantasies, which oscillated between the female body as a pleasurable and complete form and his sadistic need to erase the threatening gaze of the woman.

Within patriarchal discourse women must not return the gaze nor must they speak. Despite achieving the giddy heights of post-feminism, many women still internalize these prohibitions. A structural reading of Illuminations affirms this, as the editors have, for instance, literally contained and suppressed McGrath's potentially subversive argument by positioning it between a selection of Tina Modotti's letters to Weston and an uncritical essay on Ansel Adams by Nancy Newhall. In fact, it is Newhall's piece that is cited in the introduction as the reason why (because she became a "worshipper of great men") "this cannot, therefore be a feminist anthology." Similarly, Heron and Williams's introduction to Modotti's letters calls for "a Tina seen without the contradictions of attachment to him" and yet there is no discussion of her work in this volume, only her troubled letters in which sexual difference is spelled out between the lines - he was happy and successful in Northern California while she was in jail, broke, her lover was murdered, she was then deported from Mexico (still broke) and trying to make a new life in Berlin.

It seems to me that the editors were happy to exploit the market but careful to distance themselves from any possible association with feminism. As McGrath states: "the puzzle is not simply our exclusion from discourse but our very inclusion as both marginal (out of sight) and central (on display)." An anthology such as this attempts to insert women into discourse as "honorary men" because, despite the project's gender frame, the editors confirm "that there is no such thing as a 'woman's way' of writing." Nor, it would seem, is it desirable to bring together writings about photography, which, when considered en masse, could be constitutive of a "different" perspective.

One could be forgiven for imagining that a key debate in a volume such as this might be to illuminate aspects of feminine "difference" as manifest not only in a style of writing (about photography) but also in the theorization of different critical perspectives. Martha Rosier shifted the paradigm of documentary photography in several important essays, yet this work has been excluded. Jo Spence was one of the most important writer/practitioners working in photography in recent years, yet she is represented only by a short essay written in 1976 - which is inexplicably included in the section entitled "Documentary and Reportage in North America." Although limits of space obviously dictate editorial decisions, why choose two essays by Lee Miller? Is it because I-worked-with-Man Ray Miller is sexy and Jo Spence's work about cancer isn't? Where are the critical discussions of women's photography that attempt to map the strands of a feminine aesthetic that lie beyond the conceptual projects of famous artists such as Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman?