Who was the New Woman? Today she is often celebrated as an adventurous precursor to the modern feminist, but she was hardly a welcome figure when she first emerged in the 1890s. She rejected (or undertook with ambivalence) the traditional roles of wife and mother in favor of independence and mobility. Especially in traditional and patriarchal cultures, such choices were met with hostility, as they seemed to signal an imminent breakdown of society. Not surprisingly, the archetypal New Woman was from Europe or the United States. Her ability to travel and practice a profession, sometimes in far-flung countries, brought into sharp relief the disparities in women’s lives around the globe. Indeed, there were some New Women for whom writing and journalism became a platform to promote colonialism and imperialism.1The recent exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, The New Woman Behind the Camera, featured the work of a diverse group of women artists from the first half of the twentieth century. They were from different countries and practiced in a diverse range of photographic genres. What they all had in common was photography, which they used as a tool for empowerment, both professionally and personally. To varying degrees, these women were able to carve out independent lives for themselves because of their career paths, whether they worked in private studios or traveled the world. According to the woman who conceived and organized the show, Andrea Nelson, an associate curator at the National Gallery of Art, many of the women in the show might not consider themselves feminists or New Women. And yet, their life experiences suggest otherwise: “The fight for having the ability to make life choices, from whether or not you want to work outside the home, whether or not you want to marry, whether or not you want to have children, to be more politically active—I think the New Woman is a symbol of that.”2What happened to a woman’s sense of self when she learned to see the world through a camera lens, producing and selling her work, and (in rare cases) working in distant countries or war zones? What happened to the form and content of photography in the hands of the New Woman? Is there a distinctive female gaze that we can find in photographs made by women? Questions like these seem to have provided the basis for the exciting and often revelatory exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, and the accompanying in-depth catalog, The New Woman Behind the Camera, with contributions by Elizabeth Cronin, Kara Felt, Mia Fineman, Mila Ganeva, Kristen Gresh, Andrea Nelson, Elizabeth Otto, and Kim Sichel.The exhibition featured photographs by 120 women from twenty countries, produced between the 1920s and ’40s. The 185 prints represent a range of photographic genres including studio portraiture, photojournalism, advertising, fashion, and avant-garde experimental photography. Most of the works are black-and-white prints, with the exhibition rounded out with some color prints and contextual displays including magazine layouts, photobooks, recordings of film and television interviews, and photographic ephemera. The work was arranged in sections by themes that cut across countries and historical periods: The New Woman (portraits and self-portraits), The Studio, The City, Avant-garde Experimentation, Ethnographic Approaches, Modern Bodies, Fashion and Advertising, Social Documentary, and Reportage.One of the great strengths of the exhibition was the effort to bring lesser-known women into the photo history canon and to celebrate women from countries that have been excluded from most histories of the medium. No photographer had more than six prints on view, and many had only one, a choice that helped to counterbalance the outsize reputations of those probably most familiar to museum visitors such as Berenice Abbott, Ilse Bing, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Lisette Model.One of the delights of this show was discovering a handful of “new women” in the sense of newly rediscovered. Among the relatively obscure photographers whose work was brought to light in this show were some who attained distinction, albeit limited to their native countries or in their time. A noteworthy example is Tsuneko Sasamoto, Japan’s first female photojournalist and one of the country’s oldest living photographers at 107 years old. When Nelson traveled to Japan to interview Sasamoto in 2017 and 2018, she found a woman who was “lively and engaging, full of questions” and who had only recently given up photography.3 Starting in 1946, Sasamoto worked in Tokyo as a freelance photographer. Ginza 4 Chome P.X. (1946), included in the exhibition, gives viewers a sense of the contradictions of postwar life, with a modern young woman walking past a post exchange, a symbol of the American military occupation.Another previously hidden treasure was Florestine Perrault Collins, the only Black woman known to have operated a portrait studio in New Orleans during the first half of the twentieth century. Her life story epitomizes the camera as a tool of empowerment. After toiling as a cleaner in a dental office, she chose to “pass” (present herself) as white in order to work alongside white photographers in the segregated South. After honing her photography skills in several studios, she opened her own in-home studio in 1920. Three years later she moved the studio to a commercial space in a Black business district in downtown New Orleans.4 In a self-portrait taken to advertise her studio, included in the show, Collins is shot in profile, wearing a stylish dress and with a jeweled clip in her bobbed hair. She looks very much the part of the New Woman.Social documentary and reportage photography gave some women (particularly those in Western Europe and the US) an instrument of empowerment and a means to travel to distant parts of the world. For example, Brazilian city scenes were photographed beautifully and compellingly by Alice Brill, Genevieve Naylor, and Hildegard Rosenthal—women born in Germany, the US, and Switzerland, respectively. But were there any Brazilian women photographers? If so, why was their work not included in the exhibition? On a related note, the show has a notable lack of photographs of Africa or work by African women photographers, an omission addressed in Sichel’s essay, in which she writes, “As of now, we know of no early women photographers in Africa. It is to be hoped that as research continues, they and their work will emerge from the archives.”5If there was a main through line across the different sections of the exhibition, it was the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship between gender identity and photographic empowerment. For example, we learn that Palestinian photographer Karimeh Abbud had access to images that were denied to her male contemporaries, because she could make portraits of women outside her family. It’s worth noting here that the exhibition opened with a note to visitors acknowledging that “woman photographer” is an imperfect designation. The wall text at the start of the show announced: “the nuances of gender formation and self-identification are of crucial importance. Women constitute a heterogeneous group whose individual identities are defined by a host of variable factors.”The truth of this general statement is rendered with splendid specificity in a 1928 self-portrait titled Autoportrait (Self-Portrait) by French surrealist photographer, sculptor, and writer Claude Cahun. The gender-defying portrait shows the artist with hair closely cropped, staring boldly into the camera and reflected in a mirror. Cahun’s autobiography explained: “Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that suits me.”6 Cahun’s self-portrait is one of several portraits in the show that play with identity and gender. Others use double and multiple exposures, foregrounding photography’s inherent characteristics and its ability to manipulate human perception. Another example is Bing’s 1931 Self Portrait with Leica, which uses a mirror to render two perspectives on the artist, facing forward and in profile.Two women featured in the show whose photographs and stories inspired me and made me want to know more were Lucy Ashjian (1907–93) and Homai Vyarawalla (1913–2012). Ashjian was an American photographer whose parents were Armenian refugees. She was a member of the New York Photo League and an editor of Photo Notes. She was largely forgotten until a cache of prints and negatives was found in 2003. Vyarawalla has been called India’s first woman photojournalist. Her career started in 1938 at the Bombay Chronicle and she worked for the British Information Service from the 1940s until 1970. The New Woman Behind the Camera included Ashjian’s Savoy Dancers (1935–43), of an African American couple on the dance floor. It also featured Vyarawalla’s photograph The Victoria Terminus, Bombay (c. early 1940s), which shows Mumbai’s railway station from a unique perspective. Vyarawalla’s camera was held low to the ground, and she viewed the station through the wheels of a rickshaw, creating a fresh and unexpected composition.The New Woman Behind the Camera provided a much-needed reminder of the simple pleasure of walking through a museum exhibition with other people after too many months of enforced social distancing. It was fascinating to notice which images caused visitors to stop and linger, or to pull out their phone and snap a picture. I saw a young Asian or Asian American woman photograph Lange’s World War II image of Wanto’s grocery store in San Francisco, with two signs attached (“For Sale” and “I am an American”) after Japanese Americans had been rounded up and taken to internment camps. In the wake of COVID-19, we have sadly seen a wave of anti-Asian violence in the US, which makes this classic photograph even more poignant and relevant. But for me the biggest takeaway from this visit was that there are more women photographers whose stories are rich and layered, and just waiting to be told. I am confident that the exhibition catalog, with its extensive bibliography, will inspire researchers to start their own journeys of discovery.