“History is written by the victors”.[1] Or is it?

This aphorism suggests that accepted records of historical events are incomplete and somewhat subjective, tending to privilege the skilled documentarians of powerbrokers and gatekeepers. The results are that many events and people who should be included are often left out or siloed in echo chambers that are rarely included in the sanctioned canon. Ideally, history is fluid and should be democratically written—not just by the winners—and to a degree, this does happen in a cyclical process of unwriting and rewriting history in expansive and contractive stages that slowly add forgotten names and marginalised voices. I call this the “rubber band effect” of historical documentation, where during progressive times, the canon stretches to be more inclusive, but then ultimately snaps back to its original narrative during more conservative times, eliminating many of the newly inserted voices except for a few that manage to remain. The more radical the expansion, the more severe the springing back and elimination are. However, over time, the rubber band becomes more pliable and thus future attempts at insertion may be more effective.

This historical rubber band effect of discovery, insertion, and then some re-expulsion of forgotten or under-recognised voices, projects, and authors actively shapes the historiography of photobooks, with periods of expansion allowing for research that slowly rewrites the canon in a “two steps forward, one step backward” rhythm. For the past decade, photobook history has been in a period of rediscovery, with new research mining written, visual, and oral sources for photobooks and authors previously left out. Under the freedoms afforded in this period, in 2012, Olga Yatskevich and I launched 10×10 Photobooks, a nonprofit research-driven organization with a mission “to support the photobook community through a focus on contemporary practice, overlooked publications, stories, and creators in photobook histories”.[2] Working in three-year cycles with a team of more than twenty researchers and writers, we undertake to shine a light on overlooked areas of photobook historiography.

In 2016, 10×10 Photobooks began its investigation into marginalised authors and photobook projects by women. Within a period of expansion, we found a receptive audience for our mission to rewrite women’s roles in the conceptualization, creative development, production, and historical documentation of the photographic medium in book format. Not only were many women authors and their books missing, but so too were the women historians who undertook photobook research in prior generations. Among them was Elizabeth McCausland, historian, art critic and life partner of Berenice Abbott, who in 1942 wrote “Photographic Books” in The Complete Photographer: A Complete Guide to Amateur and Professional Photography, one of the first essays on photobooks;[3] as were more recent elder stateswomen, such as Mattie Boom, who in 1989, collaborated with Rijksdienst Beeldende Kunst to curate, edit and co-write the exhibition catalogue for Foto in omslag, Het Nederlandse documentaire fotoboek na 1945 (Photography Between Covers: The Dutch Documentary Photobook After 1945), a survey of postwar Dutch photobooks. Also sidelined was the work of Mirelle Thijssen, another Dutch historian who published Het Bedrijfsfotoboek 1945-1965 (The Corporate Photobook in the Netherlands, 1945-1965) in 2002. Instead, the photobook canon of the early 2000s dates the start of photobook exhibitions and the first book-on-photobooks to 1999—ten years after Mattie’s Boom’s publication—when Horacio Fernández released Fotografía Publica. Photography in Print 1919-1939, in association with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, followed by The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century, edited by Andrew Roth in 2001.  For years afterward, the dominant narrative on photobooks was set forth by male historians, collectors, and writers, erasing or downplaying the contributions to the field by McCausland, Boom, and Thijssen.

As Kristen Lubben states in her essay “Partial Histories: Looking at Photobooks by Women” in How We See: Photobooks by Women (2017), our first collaborative book on contemporary photobooks by women, “What gets left out of dominant histories isn’t neutral or accidental, but a result of the structures that produce and preserve them”.[4] Thus, even an acknowledgment of early research on photobooks by women is clouded by a history written by the victors and its subsequent systemic bias. 10×10 Photobooks’ research expands the rubber band of photobook historiography to include not just the books by women, but also the historians who documented them and to insert their names so that when it snaps back, as it seems to be doing globally now with anti-diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the United States, the canon would be pliable enough to not expunge them again.

It is, therefore, on the shoulders of these women that we began our photobook research and commitment to expand the history of photobooks to include women. Before engaging others in a collaborative process of championing women photobook authors, Olga and I undertook to compile some statistics on the representation of women within the more celebrated sectors of photobook publishing, distribution, and competitions. The results of our informal survey were not surprising but nonetheless depressing.

In 2017, 10×10 Photobooks found that photobooks by women account for:[5]

10.5% of “books-on-photobooks” anthology entries
16.2% of online bookseller inventory
39.5% of first book & dummy award shortlists
28.5% of first book & dummy award winners

With these statistics in mind, we felt an even more pressing need to reinsert the marginalised voices of women, and initiated How We See: Photobooks by Women, an anthology and reading room that focuses on contemporary photobooks by women worldwide. Consistent with our community-based research ethos, we invited ten women selectors (either individually or in pairs)—all experts in the photobook field—who lived in or were associated with diverse geographic regions to each pick ten photobooks by women (or nonbinary people) published between 2000 and 2017.[6] Working under a strict conflict of interest policy, we disallowed selectors from including a book that they were directly involved with, such as being the publisher, author, photographer, or writer. In addition, our definition of photobooks by women required that all photography contributions in a selected book are by women or those who self-identify as women. (A male writer was permitted, but not a male photographer, as a collaborator). Inevitably, these policies and the subjective nature of individual selections caused a few significant books to be excluded from this project.

The resulting selections, which are organised geographically in How We See, are books that run the gamut from social explorations to personal journals to abstract meditations on time and space. Aside from being authored by women, no overarching aesthetic, narrative, or conceptual structure defines the one hundred books showcased in the project. What emerges is that women’s contributions to the field of photobooks are as far-reaching and diverse as their male counterparts. For example, Liz Johnson Artur’s 2016 eponymous monograph (selected by Oluremi Onabanjo) shares thirty years of portraits from Africa and its diaspora to focus on Black subjectivity, while Pixy Liao’s Experimental Relationship: Vol. 1 (2007-2017) (2017, selected by Miwa Susuda), confronts the socially projected interactions in heterosexual relationships. Geopolitical consequences are explored in Anka Gujabidze’s Rastavi: What the hell brought you here? (2013, selected by Daria Tuminas), an assessment of a dead Georgian city in a post-industrial landscape in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, while the construction of public discourse is presented in Maria Isabel Arango’s Los gestos muertos (2017, selected by Mariela Sancari), a book composed of the cropped hand gestures of Colombian politicians during peace talks. The wide-ranging topics and visual styles at play in these contemporary photobooks are more a reflection of social, cultural, and aesthetic concerns than of women-specific topics.

10×10 Photobooks is often asked the question, “Is there a unifying or distinctive quality to photobooks by women?” And our answer is always, “No”. To narrowly place women into a one-size-fits-all definition does a disservice to the plurality of their unique personal voices. Rather, our aim with How We See has been to illuminate the existence of women authors and their books, while emphasizing the diversity of their topics, design, and content in the face of ongoing marginalization. Toward that goal, we added two addenda to the How We See publication: an abridged selection of one hundred historical photobooks by women (published before 2000 and selected by an international team of ten historians, curators, and researchers) and a brief history of women’s involvement with the medium.

In addition to a publication, each project includes an accompanying hands-on touring reading room that physically shares the books highlighted in the project selection. Partnering with museums, libraries, and nonprofits, we create inviting spaces that allow the public to engage with the books at their leisure. How We See reading rooms toured to the New York Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MEP (Paris), the Museum of Fine Arts, FOLA (Fototeca Latinoamericana, Buenos Aires), and PGH Photo at the Carnegie Museum (Pittsburgh).[7] While these reading rooms of contemporary books were on view, visitors frequently asked about the historical books cited in the abridged historical section in the How We See publication, as these photobooks were not on view.

Several months later, the world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, and the 10×10 Photobooks team found itself with time for sustained research. Breaking with our past model of “ten experts pick ten books,” we undertook to assemble a team of thirteen researchers and eleven essayists to document photobooks by women from 1843 to 1999. Starting with the historical selection in How We See as our basis for expanded research, Olga and I developed a list of over 250 photobooks by women authored before 2000. With limited access to the New York Public Library—our research partner on several 10×10 initiatives—we set aside a budget to buy many of the books needed for the project, as a significant number of historical photobooks by women were still undervalued in 2020, and many continue to be as of this writing.

Rather than defining photobooks by geographic region, the books we selected for What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999—the title for this follow-up historical anthology—are organised into ten chronological chapters. Commencing with the first photobook done by either a woman or man, we document British botanist Anna Atkins’ Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843-1853) on the first pages of our first chapter, re-establishing her groundbreaking role in photobook history. Although she is also included in several earlier book-on-photobook anthologies, Gerry Badger and Martin Parr in The Photobooks: A History, Vol. 1 cast doubt on her role as the first photobook author, writing:

There is a body of opinion amongst some photographic historians that Anna Atkins’s three-volume Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843–53), rather than Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature should be recognised as the world’s first photographically illustrated book, but against it is the fact that it was printed in a very small number of copies for purely private circulation. Also, Atkins’s cyanotypes (blueprints) were made without a camera and could be considered photographic process prints rather than photographs, although they are both documents and photo-images of rare beauty. The consensus is still inclined to award the palm to Talbot, possibly because The Pencil of Nature has the far more alluring ring to it than Photographs of Algae.[8]

Against this practice of diminishing the role of women photographers and authors, we sought out others who may have been omitted or sidelined because “their title did not have an alluring ring”, or they collaborated with a male partner who received all the credit or were not credited at all. Among our discoveries were Isabel Agnes Cowper,[9] the first woman to hold the Official Museum Photographer title at the South Kensington Museum in London (renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum), whose name had been erased from the museum’s history, and Alice Seeley Harris, who published one of the first examples of a photographic humanitarian campaign[10] in c.1906. But we were still impeded by women authors who marked their works with a gender-neutral signature, or 19th- and early 20th-century women’s lack of access to traditional publishing or funding sources or conventional definitions of a photobook: a bound volume with photographic illustrations that are either published by the author, an independent publisher, or a trade publisher. By casting a wider net that included “amateur” photographers and expanding our definition of a photobook to include individual albums, exhibition pamphlets, scrapbooks, maquettes, zines and artists’ books, we were able to uncover many early women whose work had gone unnoticed, such as Arabella Chapman, a Black woman in Albany, New York, who composed two “self-curated” albums that provide a rare glimpse of middle-class Black life in the late 1870s into the 1890s.

Further discoveries of this nature were exposed as we progressed chronologically in our research. Yet there were still many roadblocks where our research came to a dead end at a brief mention of a woman author, or an ambiguous citation of a woman’s collaboration with a male partner that suggests a photobook, but with no concrete evidence. We determined that leaving these out would be a missed opportunity. We therefore decided to add to What They Saw a “timeline” that presents several of the historically significant publishing, magazine, small press, photography, and feminist events that may or may not have produced a photobook but have undoubtedly influenced its history. Inevitably, several of the timeline entries represent incomplete histories that need further research in our ongoing rewriting of photobook history. To support further exploration, 10×10 underwrites in association with photographer Dayanita Singh a research grants program to encourage scholarship on under-explored topics in photobook history.

Our unwriting and rewriting of photobook historiography to include the voices of many forgotten or marginalised women authors, producers, and photobook historians is far from complete and admittedly subjective, despite our wish for it to be as inclusive as possible. As the What They Saw Reading Room began to tour the New York Public Library, Enter Enter and Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Boston Athenaeum, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, we were made aware of several important books we omitted, such as Ming Smith’s A Ming Breakfast: Grits and Scrambled Moments (1992), Eva Pennick’s Photo Albums (1934 -c. 1936) and Deborah Turbeville’s Wallflower (1978). We also sought to determine if our study and the research conducted by others affected the representation of women within the sectors of photobook publishing, distribution, and competitions since our 2017 statistics.

From 2018 to 2024, 10×10 Photobooks found that photobooks by women account for:[11]

13.75% of “books-on-photobooks” anthology entries (increase of 3.25%)
22.4% of online bookseller inventory (an increase of 6.2%)
48.7% of first book & dummy award shortlists (an increase of 9.2%)
62% of first book & dummy award winners (an increase of 33.4%)

The news for women is promising, most notably in the award competitions, where many young photobook authors gain their first entry into the photobook ecosystem. And notably, winning books by women authors were in the majority for the first time at the book and dummy awards. However, these statistics still reveal an ongoing lack of research or support for backlisted or historical photobooks by women, indicating that the scope of the rubber band has expanded in the past decade to encompass a few discoveries. But much work is still needed. As we slip into a period of contraction, funding for research is closing down, especially in the United States, where DEI is now a dirty word and any subject that hints at its inclusion is being scrubbed from government, academic, and corporate agendas. It now falls to the private sector, unwavering researchers, and institutions to continue the path forward in the discovery of more names and titles that reinforce women’s roles in the historical documentation, production, dissemination, and authoring of photobooks. This constant “two steps forward, one step backward” process needs our unrelenting attention to mitigate against the contraction we are now heading toward in this anti-DEI moment in American academia—one that disavows the equity and inclusivity that has contributed to the recent expansion of a more democratic photobook canon.

 

Russet Lederman
Writer, Editor, and Photobook Collector
Co-founder of 10×10 Photobooks