MOPA@SDMA (Museum of Photographic Arts @ The San Diego Museum of Art)
1649 El Prado
CA 92101 San Diego
mopa.org/exhibition/women-in-focus/
“Although the result is obtained by chemical means, the little work it entails will greatly please ladies.” So wrote one of photography’s inventors, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851), about his eponymous daguerreotype in 1839. Daguerre’s words, which associate women with idleness, are clearly misogynistic. Yet in a backhanded way, Daguerre predicted the pivotal role women would play in photography since its invention in the 1830s. Undaunted by photographic chemistry—and often neglected or derided by their male peers—women have made huge contributions to the development of the medium across a variety of genres.
In the nineteenth century, photography was more accessible than established artistic disciplines like painting and sculpture because it was new and thus free from conventional training that historically prohibited women. Women took up photography in increasing numbers in the twentieth century, and by the 1930s, some of the most successful photographers in the world included Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Imogen Cunningham, all on view in this exhibition. Women in Focus, drawn from The San Diego Museum of Art’s permanent collection (which merged with the Museum of Photographic Arts in 2023), allows for a fuller account of the medium’s history by highlighting how women have shaped photography from the mid-nineteenth century to today.