Fast Forward and Rewind: Voices of Women Photographers

Abstract

Revisiting an archive of women’s voices talking about the reasons they create work using photography, reveals more than just the questions asked, the topics discussed, and the words spoken, but whose narratives are being told and who is missed. Each photographer has a different story to tell, but they are all linked by gender and tenacity. Some were drawn to using photography as a political tool, others to find a new language to interpret the world around them, still others as social commentary. All the interview extracts are from my archive of artist interviews that now number over 1,600 and which I began twenty-five years ago. From the 96-year-old Dorothy Bohm to the New Zealand feminist Alexis Hunter, who sadly died in 2014. From Violeta Bubelytė working in Lithuania to the German photographer Steffi Klenz working in Britain, from the African American Nona Faustine and her personal interrogation of black history in New York to Haley Morris-Cafiero and her engagement with Fat Shaming and the Internet.