Historical Heroines born in September

Hilla Becher born 2 September 1934

After a long apprenticeship in Berlin, German photographer Hilla Becher (1934-2015) began a 40 year collaboration with her husband Bernd photographing the disappearing industrial architecture of Europe and North America. Their work has been defined as ‘post-war conceptual art’, following in the tradition of August Sander, framing Germany in an idealized melancholy past. The first subject of their unique collaborative vision was the Framework Houses of Siegen in the Rhineland in 1959. They photographed other industrial structures, such as towers and tanks, and became known for their technical precision and aesthetic – photographing front-on against a flat, grey background, grouping in grids or ‘typologies’-which was labelled the ‘Düsseldorf School’, after the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf where they taught for many decades.

Olive Edis born 3 September 1876

Mary Olive Edis (1876-1955) opened her first studio with her sister Katherine (Legat) in the early 1900s in Norfolk and specialised in portraiture and photographing fishermen. She was entirely self-taught and pioneered colour autochrome portraiture. Olive was one of the first women to be accepted as a member of the Royal Photographic Society in 1913 and as a Fellow in 1914. Besides photographing the likes of Mrs Pankhurst and Lloyd George in her long career, which stretched into the 1950s, she was commissioned to photograph British Women’s services during WW1 and the battlefields of France and Flanders in 1918-19 for the Imperial War Museum.

Ruth Orkin born 3 September 1921

American photographer Ruth Orkin (1921 – 1985) grew up in Hollywood, the daughter of a silent film actress.  Self-taught, like her contemporaries Berenice Abbott and Helen Levitt, she began taking photographs at the age of 17 on a bicycle trip from Los Angeles to New York City to go to the 1939 World Fair. Fearless and feisty, she settled in New York in 1943 and started her career as a nightclub and portrait photographer.

She spent 3 summers documenting the Tanglewood Music Festival in the late 40s and soon made her name with her first freelance project, a portrait of Leonard Bernstein for the New York Times. She taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the International Centre of Photography (ICP), but when she became ill and housebound with cancer, she started photographing from her apartment overlooking Central Park, capturing parades and the changing landscape. These photographs were the subject of two widely acclaimed books, “A World Through My Window” (1978) and “More Pictures From My Window.” (1983)

Mariana Yampolsky born 6 September 1925

Mariana Yampolsky (1925-2002) is one of Mexico’s most influential photographers. She was the daughter of Russian artists who emigrated to the United States and granddaughter of anthropologist Franz Boas. She settled in Mexico to pursue her passion for art and became a Mexican citizen in 1958. Mariana’s work focuses on photographing the everyday life of common people in the rural Mexico and draws inspiration from their unique and macabre folklore. She captures their essence by dignifying agrarian work, praising the indigenous flora and people of the land and focusing on powerful themes such as beliefs, motherhood, poverty and death.

Maud Sulter born 19 September 1960

Maud Sulter (1960–2008) was a Ghanaian/ Scottish photographic artist and poet. Her career in photography began with her participation in the 1985 exhibition The Thin Black Line at the ICA in London (curated by Lubaina Himid) and her photomontage series Sphinx (1987) –on the legacies of slavery in St. James’ Island;   Zabat (1989 –  black women as the muses;  and Hysteria (1991) – inspired by 19th century African American sculptor Edmonia Lewis. She was Principal Lecturer in Fine Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University in the early 1990s and founded a publishing imprint, Urban Fox Press.

Maud won many awards and international recognition for her pioneering activist stance and influential use of archival materials during her short lifetime. She represented Britain at the first Johannesburg Biennale in 1995 with Syrcas, her photomontage series reflecting on forgotten Black histories of the Holocaust.

Marie Cosindas born 22 September 1923

American colour polaroid pioneer Marie Cosindas (1923 – 2017) started her career experimenting with the newly launched colour polaroid format in the 1960s and was a pioneer of colour photography.

She was born into a Greek-American family in Boston, Massachusetts and trained a textile designer. She began photography classes in 1961 with famed black and white landscape photographer Ansel Adams, and when Polaroid Land was looking for photographers to test their new film in 1962, he recommended her to them. Her resulting painterly still lives and portraits thrilled the company. Her career was launched when some of these first 4 x 5 prints were shown at MoMA in a travelling exhibition in 1966. Marie was only the 5th woman to be so honoured in the museum’s history.

Her intense, saturated colour ‘arrangements’ of dolls, flowers and masks, influenced by 17th century Dutch still lives, became her signature but sadly her retro style was eclipsed in the 70s and 80s by Pop Art and Minimalism. Polaroids ironically became used by artists like Andy Warhol in the 70s for their spontaneity and immediacy, whilst her crafted experiments with exposure, temperature and filters and Symbolist imagery, fell out of fashion.

*Hundred Heroines is mindful of photography’s problematic history with race: colonialism and photography were mutually intertwined in Europe’s industrial and imperial expansion. We recognise that many women photographers of the 19th/20th centuries were wealthy, privileged and white, and often played a role in perpetuating colonial stereotypes. We celebrate their achievements in overcoming the obstacle of gender and acknowledge the need to move forward in terms of representation. No community or culture should be exploited in favour of the image.