Women Behind the Camera: How They’ve Shaped and Influenced Photography
Even though women have been working in photography since the medium’s inception, they are often under-represented in museum and other photography collections. By focusing on iconic works that women have created using photographic techniques, this course seeks to inspire students and enable them to find out more about the work of women photographers on their own. Through critical reading of texts, presentations, individual research, and group discussion, you’ll learn about both individual images and broad initiatives promoting the work of women photographers. Together, we will consider images from fields as diverse as art, journalism, and fashion by taking a closer look at the iconic works of Anna Atkins, Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, Zofia Rydet, Graciela Iturbide, Dayanita Singh, Carrie-Mae Weems, Nadine Ijewere and more. This class will involve individual work, so students should plan to devote time outside of class each week on research.
Dortje Fink is an art and photography historian, educator, cultural organizer and podcaster based in Berlin. With academic training at Humboldt University in Berlin and Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, her research interests involve photographic archives, exhibition histories, lens-based media art, visual culture, biases of canonization, and decentering the history of photography. Her deep engagement with works of Carrie Mae Weems, Philip Kwame Apagya, Boris Mikhailov, Martin Chambi, Nickolas Muray, and Manfred Paul has inspired her writing, which has been published in exhibition catalogues and magazines. Since 2014, she has been working with C/O Berlin — an exhibition space dedicated to photography and visual media. She hosts, along with Julia Wolf, the German podcast “rein theoretisch – Fotografisches mit Fink&Wolf” about photographs whose visibility is restricted for a variety of reasons.
Dortje teaches the history of photography for StrudelmediaLive.
