2-Class Module
Suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in: Photography • Visual Studies • Art History •
Media Studies • Women’s & Gender Studies • Book Arts • Documentary Studies • Curatorial Practice.
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Download PDF Visuals – Deck for 2-Class Module
Module Overview
This two-class module uses What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999 as the primary text to examine how women have shaped the history of photography through the photobook—a medium long dominated by male-authored narratives. The module is designed to help students develop a critical vocabulary for analyzing the relationship between gender, print format, photographic authorship, and canon formation.
What They Saw is a 352-page anthology surveying 258 examples of photography in print—classic bound books, portfolios, personal albums, unpublished books, zines, and scrapbooks—spanning from Anna Atkins’s cyanotype albums of 1843 to the photobooks of the late 1990s. Edited by Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich and published by 10×10 Photobooks, the book is organized chronologically into themed chapters: Trailblazers (1843–1919), The New Woman (1920s–1930s), From Ashes to A Family (1946–1955), Nostalgia, Pop, and Revolution (1960s–70s), Sexual Politics (1976–1979), and Reaching for a Photo Democracy (1980s–90s). Eleven commissioned essays by scholars including Mariama Attah, Jörg Colberg, Elizabeth Cronin, Deirdre Donohue, Anthony Hamber, Christine Hult-Lewis, Michiko Kasahara, Paula V. Kupfer, Jeffrey Ladd, Carole Naggar, and Tony White provide critical frameworks for engaging with the material.
The book’s central inquiry—Who has been included in the photobook canon, who has been excluded, and what does it mean to reconstruct that history with women at the center?—provides the organizing question for this module. Across two classes, students will examine how gender has shaped access to publication, how format and materiality carry meaning, and how anthologies like What They Saw act as interventions in art-historical canon formation.
Learning Objectives
- Analyze how women’s photobooks have used diverse print formats—bound volumes, portfolios, albums, zines, and scrapbooks—to assert authorial vision and navigate the constraints of the publishing landscape across different historical periods.
- Examine the historical conditions—social, political, technological, and institutional—that enabled or constrained women’s access to photographic publication from the mid-nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth century.
- Evaluate the anthology as an act of canon formation, considering what editorial choices reveal about how photographic history is constructed, challenged, and revised when women’s contributions are centered.
- Compare photobooks by women across different geographical, cultural, and historical contexts, identifying both shared strategies of self-representation and locally specific approaches to image-making and bookmaking.
- Develop critical vocabulary for discussing the materiality of photographic publications—paper, typography, binding, sequencing, image quality, layout—and their relationship to questions of gender, visibility, and authorship.
Required Text
What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999, ed. Russet Lederman & Olga Yatskevich (New York: 10×10 Photobooks, 2021). 352 pp., 672 images. Softcover with dust jacket. ISBN: 978-0-578-93213-2. Winner of the 2021 Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation Catalogue of the Year Award and the 2022 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award. Named one of Time Magazine’s 20 Best Photobooks of 2021. Available from 10×10 Photobooks for $85.
Class 1:
Invisible Histories — Women, the Photobook and the Canon
| Duration | 75–90 minutes |
| Assigned Reading | Mariama Attah’s introductory essay “Remapping Photobook History.”Anthony Hamber’s essay on “Trailblazers,” early women photographers and the invention of the photobook.Carole Naggar’s essay on “The New Woman” on women’s vernacular photography and the album tradition Chapters: Introduction, Trailblazers (1843–1919) and The New Woman (1920–1935), complete |
| Key Themes | Canon and exclusion; the photobook as gendered object; vernacular formats (albums, scrapbooks) as acts of authorship; materiality and access; the relationship between domesticity, scientific inquiry, and photographic publication |
Class 2:
Gender, the Body and the Afterlife of the Photobook
| Duration | 75–90 minutes |
| Assigned Reading | Michiko Kasahara’s essay on Japanese women photographers; Carole Naggar’s essay on women and war photography Chapters: Sexual Politics (1976–1979), complete, plus one additional chapter of the student’s choice. Can be: From Ashes to A Family; Nostalgia, Pop, and Revolution; or Reaching for a Photo Democracy. |
| Key Themes | The body and self-representation; feminist publishing networks; the photobook as personal and political statement; re-contextualization of women’s work through the anthology form; recovery versus discovery in photographic history |