Abstract
Abstract Once central figures in Pacific Coast pictorial photography, Myra Albert Wiggins is now a footnote and Helen Plummer Gatch an entirely displaced person in the standard histories of the medium.1 But in acknowledging that they are marginal (or considered so) to the accepted story, we identify, ironically, their significance to scholarship in the maturing discipline of photographic history. Why is the marginal significant? Jonathan Culler has written that ‘concentration on the apparently marginal puts the logic of supplementarity to work as an interpretative strategy: what has been related to the margins or set aside by previous interpreters may be important precisely for those reasons that led it to being set aside’.2 If Wiggins and Gatch have been 'set aside' for reasons of provincialism, changes in aesthetic taste, gender, the politicized world of American photography in which they worked, and in the case of Gatch her own later indifference, their stories may indeed be significant ‘precisely for those reasons’.
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