Marion Post Wolcott
[Photographer, b. 1910, Bloomfield, New Jersey, d. 1990, Santa Barbara, California.]
When I took the FSA job, I already had battle scars. I had weathered... the first weeks as a female full-time staff photographer on the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin... The ten male photographers with whom I was to work, immediately put out their cigarette butts in my developer, spit in and hypoed it, probably peed in it; threw spit balls into my cubby-hole darkroom until my aim and speed became better than theirs. Finally, I exploded—telling them I was there to stay... That did it; we reached a truce... soon each one confidentially telling me that the others were wolves and he was going to be my protector.
Rosalind Krauss
[Writer, critic, and historian, b. 1941, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
Within surrealist practice, too,
woman was in construction, for she is the obsessional object there as well. And since the vehicle through which she is figured is itself manifestly constructed,
woman and
photograph become figures for each other’s condition: ambivalent, blurred, indistinct, and lacking in, to use Edward Weston’s word, “authority.”
Bert Stern
[Photographer, b. 1929, Brooklyn, New York, d. 2013, New York.]
Women like to take their clothes off. I noticed that. Especially in front of a camera. Or a mirror.
Barbara DeGenevieve
[Photographer, artist, and curator, b. 1947, d. 2014, Chicago, Illinois.]
In using the style of the “erotic/pornographic” story, I am interested in dismantling stereotypes of an “essential” feminine identity, particularly one of exclusive tenderness and passivity.
Joyce Tenneson
[Photographer, b. 1945, Weston, Massachusetts, lives in New York.]
I’ve always been obsessed with penetrating the female psyche. When I shoot, I’m like a tornado. I never sit down, never take a break, never eat. I’m focused on getting that moment of revelation, of insight, of poignancy, of meaning.
Berenice Abbott
[Photographer, writer, teacher, b. 1898, Springfield, Ohio, d. 1991, Monson, Maine.]
I’m not a nice girl; I’m a photographer.
(On being told by a Federal Art Project official, after she photographed the Bowery, that “a nice girl should not go into such neighborhoods”)
Gertrude Käsebier
[Photographer, b. 1852, Fort Des Moines, Iowa, (now Des Moines), d. 1934, New York.]
I am now a mother and a grandmother, and I do not recall that I have ever ignored the claims of the nomadic button and the ceaseless call for sympathy, and the greatest demand on time and patience. My children and their children have been my closest thought, but from the first days of dawning individuality, I have longed unceasingly to make pictures of people... to make likenesses that are biographies, to bring out in each photograph the essential temperament that is called, soul, humanity.
Rankin (John Rankin Waddell)
[Photographer, b. 1966, Glasgow, Scotland, lives in London.]
I always used to say to my ex-girlfriends that I could never take a good photograph of them, because there was too much of an intimacy between us, but actually the real thing is, if there’s a proper intimacy between you… I find it really compelling and exciting—it’s quite good foreplay.
