A beautiful Sunday afternoon, so I headed off to the NGV International to see the ‘Women Photographers’ exhibition – weeks and weeks before it closes on 3 May 2026. The exhibition is both chronological and thematic, starting with city-based studios in the early 1900s which captured images of families and especially children, and film stars and celebrities. The suffragettes, with an eye to publicity, used photographs to shape the public image of the suffrage campaign, aided by the use of photographs in newspaper articles. In Weimar Germany, women photographers captured modernity the ‘new woman’ fashion and you really get a sense of how the Nazi regime cut a swathe through progressive and artistic Jewish photographers as they fled for safer places. Demand for images in magazines and catalogues opened up opportunities for women photographers, and the growth of cities encouraged urban landscape photography. Female photographers were part of the avant-garde, and there are images of Pablo Picasso taken by Dora Maar, Lee Miller’s images of Man Ray and even Helen Garner in a share house backyard! Social Documentary photography was used by the Farm Security Administration to bolster support for FDR’s New Deal during the Depression. The exhibition closes with the year 1975, the first International Women’s Year, where photography was an expression of second-wave feminism.
There were some extracts from documentaries as well, so I rested my weary legs and back looking at them. I was fascinated by this interview with Berenice Abbott, (in YouTube, it’s the whole interview, not just extracts) who was probably the earliest photographer featured in the film display. She left for Paris in the 1920s. She worked with Man Ray as his studio assistant in Paris in 1923-1925, and it was there that she met Eugène Atget, whose project involved photographing Paris before it was destroyed by modernity. When she returned to America, she embarked on a similar project in New York.
She talks about taking this image of New York at night. It was a 15 minute exposure, and there was only a short period of time in which it was dark enough before 5.00 p.m. to take the photo. At 5.00 p.m. all the office workers went home, and the lights were turned off, so there were only a few days of the year where both conditions were met.
A good exhibition. I happily spent a couple of hours there (my legs and back were not quite so happy), then came out into the late afternoon sunshine of a beautiful autumn Melbourne day- my favourite time of the year.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 