A Different Lens: Pegg Clarke, E. G. Shaw and the History of Australian Women’s Photography

Abstract

Many women were actively engaged in photography in Australia from the nineteenth century. However, women’s contributions to the field are under-represented in extant histories of Australian photography, particularly photography prior to the 1970s. This essay explores some of the reasons for that erasure and offers two acts of historical and textual recovery. Drawing on new archival research, I examine the lives and work of two little-known Australian women photographers of the early twentieth century: Pegg Clarke and Eleanor Georgina Shaw. Pegg Clarke (1890–1956) was a successful studio, portrait and art photographer who was active from the 1910s through to the 1950s. Eleanor Georgina Shaw (E. G. Shaw; 1870–1954) was an amateur street, urban and architectural photographer who was active in Sydney from the 1910s through to the 1930s. In navigating some of the epistemological and practical challenges of working with these archival collections, and at times engaging in what Saidiya Hartman calls ‘critical fabulation’, I weave together the fragmentary remains of these two women’s careers in an attempt to place them on the critical map. I also offer some speculations as to how their work might provide an opportunity to revise, if in modest ways, extant histories of Australian photography.