Women Photographers – The Other Observers 1900 to the Present –

“In this fascinating view of British women photographers, obscured by time, fashion and the mere fact of being the ‘other observers’, Val Williams charts their course from the turn of the century to the 1980s.
The early documentary work by the ‘Women of Pervyse ‘of the First World War and Norah Smyths’s photographs of London’s East End are in sharp contrast to Christina Broom’s glamorous and flamboyant suffrage portraits. From the 1920s to the ’50s Vanessa Bell created the Charleston idyll of family life in her seemingly casual snapshots. Counterposed to this domesticity was the innovative and modish photography of Barbara Ker-Seymer and Ursula Powys-Lybbe. Different again in approach and concerns was the radical documentary work of Helen Muspratt and Edith Tudor Hart, and Grace Robertson’s photojournalism for Picture Post, while the surrealist imaginings of Madame Yevonde carry studio portraiture in quite new directions.

Val Williams persuasively demonstrates how this richly diverse inheritance reflects itself in today’s range of approaches: from community based photography to photomontage, from the celebratory pictures of women at Greenham Common to questioning looks at self-image, Women Photographers is an original and invaluable addition to photographic and cultural history.”