Reiterating with a Difference: Feminist Visual Agency and Late Nineteenth-Century Photography

In July 1900, accompanied by her mother and her aunt, Frances Benjamin Johnston traveled to Paris as the sole American delegate to the International Congress of Photography (Berch; Griffith). Here, the preeminent woman photographer in America presented "The Work of Women of the United States in Photography." She illustrated her short paper with more than 150 photographs produced by 31 American women, all solicited, catalogued, and curated by Johnston herself. Ardently admired, especially by a Russian delegate who solicited permission from Johnston to exhibit the photographs in St. Petersburg and Moscow, the display celebrated American women photographers as, first, flourishing, and, second, flourishing as artists ("Three Gold Medals" 12). At the same time that Johnston made a bold artistic statement, she also made a bold political statement: through photography women could equal if not exceed men as visual agents in art and the public sphere, two arenas traditionally hostile to women.

Buoyed by the rising tide of New Woman rhetoric that promoted women's increased participation in such male-marked spheres as post-secondary education, business, science, and industry, Johnston's presentation and photographic exhibition illustrated the potential of photography to alter the condition of late nineteenth-century women. All "images embody, are indivisible, from politics," Diane Neumaier points out (1), and art-the "fountainhead from which political discourse, beliefs about politics, and consequent actions ultimately springs" (Edelman 2)-reflects the power of that image politics. By extension, then, for post-bellum women like Johnston, photography, including portrait photography, combined image politics with gender politics, offering a vehicle and a venue for the emergence of feminist visual agency: the power to look and act on that looking in ways that redress gender inequality.1 Neumaier suggests as much, arguing that photography constitutes an avenue for women's agency, "an assertion of power, a way of seizing the means of production" (2). Teresa de Lauretis goes even further, observing that a key move in the fight for feminist empowerment consists of women reshaping themselves as subjects, as "social beings producing and reproducing cultural products, transmitting and transforming cultural values" (93). Thus, Johnston and the 31 American photographic artists honored in Paris attest to the ability of women, even those without an explicit feminist agenda, to challenge "the contemporary play of powers and power relations" (Irigaray 81).