From Alice to Yva, explore the archive of Historical Heroines and learn about the rich lives and careers of pioneering women photographers. As we continue our mission, our online archives will continue grow.
Researched, written and curated by our volunteers. If you would like to contribute to this valuable resource, sign up to volunteer today.
One of America’s foremost street photographers, Helen Levitt captured the energy of the streets of Spanish Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx through her candid, quirkily framed shots of children at play....
Helena Almeida (1934 - 2018) was an influential Portuguese Post-war artist, whose work questions the traditional portrayals of women in art history....
Local heroines: Royal photographer, Dorothy Wilding, was born in Gloucester....
Chinese photojournalist Hou Bo (1924 – 2017) documented the rise of Mao Zedong from 1939 to 1968 in over 400 photographs as the official photographer of The Great Leader. She created most of the iconic images of Mao’s reign but fell...
Ida Kar was a woman of many origins who became most well-known for her portraits of London artistic circles, becoming the ‘Bohemian Photographer’....
Ilse Bing (1899–1998) was a German-born inter-war photographer who worked in photojournalism and portraiture in Paris and New York. She worked in the modernist style and innovated using solarisation and night photography. Her work was...
Possibly the South Kensington Museum’s (V & A) first female Official Museum Photographer....
American photographer Jan Groover experimented with space, light, colour, and form in painterly, large-format still lives....
Jane 'Jennie' Louise Van Der Zee toussaint Welcome was one of the only Black Women filmmakers during the silent movie era....
By Paula Velllet: "Janet Jevons” was a photographic partnership between Ruby Caroline Jevons (1894-1974) and Emilie Janet Tyrell (1887-1972) who worked together in London portrait studios throughout the 1920s and 30s....
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