By the start of the twentieth century, photography was becoming increasingly accessible to the public in many cities around the world. Previously, the medium was practised by an affluent minority of amateur artists and commercial studios. However, the production of lower-cost cameras gradually opened up photography to the broader public, particularly the expanding middle class. At the same time, women began to participate in photography as both creators and consumers. For many women, photography offered a means of income, a way to document daily life, and a powerful tool for communication and activism.

In England, suffragettes actively used photography to create and share images that were integral to their campaign for women’s right to vote. The suffragettes constructed their images in photographic studios and in the streets, merging style and fashionable dress with politics and self-assuredness. These photographs became crucial in shaping the public image of the suffrage movement.

In Australia, May and Mina Moore ran a successful photographic business. Known for their dramatically lit portraits of stage performers, they responded to the appetite for stylised portraiture as popularised by the suffragettes. At a time of shifting gender roles, May Moore also advocated publicly for women to work in photography.

Photography studios flourished in the early twentieth century. In Vienna, Austria, numerous prominent women photographers ran successful businesses, including Madame d’Ora and later Trude Fleischmann and Kitty Hoffmann. While Madame d’Ora’s glamorous portraits retained the soft focus characteristic of turn-of-the-century photography, the women in Fleischmann’s and Hoffmann’s images of the 1920s and 1930s matched the mood of the modern city. With their chic dress and bobbed haircuts, they represented the famed ‘New Woman’, or Neue Frau, an archetype that came to symbolise female empowerment and the shift away from traditional gender roles.

Opening in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, the Bauhaus art school experienced an influx of women students due to changes in the country’s constitution that guaranteed women the right to vote and study. Photography, while not officially taught at the Bauhaus for some years, flourished: it was seen to be an essential means of expression appropriate for the modern age. Lucia Moholy and her husband, Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy, promoted the idea of ‘New Vision’ at the school. The camera was seen as the ultimate mirror of the everyday, while the camera-less images they produced allowed for great experimentation and abstraction.

In the 1920s, amid the aftermath of the First World War, many European avant-garde artists experimented with photography to actively ‘see’ the world anew. So-called New Photography emerged during this period, with images characterised by the play of light and shadow, extreme vantage points and the use of sharp focus. These techniques aimed to disorient the viewer – familiar scenes were made to feel unfamiliar.

Artists embracing these styles predominantly worked in studios, creating experimental images that explored the principles of New Photography. Some images were made purely as artistic exercises, while others demonstrate the use of experimental techniques for commercial purposes. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was a great demand for modern photography in advertising, newspapers, catalogues and picture magazines. With the wide dissemination of these media, the influence of New Photography travelled far beyond Europe, and can be seen in works by Olive Cotton in Sydney, Lola Álvarez Bravo in Mexico City and Annemarie Heinrich in Buenos Aires.

The early decades of the twentieth century came to be known as the Machine Age due to rapidly increasing automation, technological change and mass production. As cities industrialised, photographers responded by capturing buildings, workers and crowds.

Germaine Krull’s photographs from the 1920s and 1930s exemplify her dynamic, modern vision. Reflecting on the inspiration she gained from photographing cranes and bridges in Europe, which eventually led to the production of her famed 1928 photobook Metal, she said: ‘These steel giants revealed something to me that made me love photography again. From this moment onward, I began to SEE things as the eye sees them, and it is at this moment that photography was born for me.’

Machine Age artists were also experimenting with photomontage, a method that offered radical new perspectives and challenged conventional ways of seeing. Photomontage emerged in direct response to industrial development, as cities expanded and everyday life transformed. Barbara Morgan’s images reflect on the tension between the natural and the constructed. In contrast, Varvara Stepanova and Aleksandr Rodchenko embraced the tools of mass production, combining design, image-making and progressive printing techniques to create graphic publications that promoted the Soviet Union’s industrial power to a wide audience.

The intertwined lives of avant-garde artists working in the interwar period often played out in works of art depicting friendship and love. Photographers captured these relationships, often revealing both the affection and the complex relations between themselves and their artistic collaborators, muses and subjects.

Paris in the interwar period was a hotbed for artistic exchange. Between 1935 and 1936, Dora Maar photographed her then partner Pablo Picasso in her Paris studio. She also created collaborative images with fellow Surrealists such as Léonor Fini, Jacqueline Lamba and André Breton. Lee Miller, also working in Paris during this period, photographed her lover and artistic partner Man Ray. Miller, in turn, was the subject of many of Man Ray’s own works.

In Mexico, Kati Horna frequently photographed her close friend, British-born painter and writer Leonora Carrington. Lola Álvarez Bravo’s image of the Spanish Surrealist artist Remedios Varo is another example of the playful and experimental collaborations between artists at the time. Such photographs demonstrate the mutual influence between women artists.

From the very beginnings of photography, the female nude genre remained primarily the domain of the male photographer. However, twentieth-century women artists, particularly those working within the avant-garde scene of the interwar period, reclaimed the male gaze, creatively experimenting with the representation of women’s bodies.

Artists such as Laure Albin Guillot and Germaine Krull produced nudes ranging from the intimate and sensual to the contained and stark. Such experimental compositions were also a vital aspect of the work of Florence Henri, whose images allowed for new readings of the body. In the 1970s artists such as Sue Ford continued this legacy of experimentation, combining depictions of women’s bodies with scenes from nature.

Representations of women’s bodies in motion were another means of artistic and physical liberation. The collaborations between dancers and artists, for example Barbara Morgan and Martha Graham, and Ellen Auerbach and Renate Schottelius, allowed for experimentation and dynamic image-making. These creative partnerships were shaped by movement and a shared response between artist and subject.

Photography has long been associated with mirrors and time – as a way of remembering, reflecting and retrieving information. As early as 1859, American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr described photography, specifically the daguerreotype, as ‘the mirror with a memory’.

Many artists use the camera to explore identity through portraits and self-portraits. In Ilse Bing’s 1931 self-portrait, captured with her Leica camera, a mirror disrupts the image, disorienting the viewer. Four decades later, Joan Jonas extended this idea, using a video monitor as a mirror to explore reflection, perception and the self.

By the 1970s, repetition and seriality became central to photographic practice. Through sequences of images, artists such as Eve Sonneman, Sue Ford and Bernd and Hilla Becher explored how photography could record and interpret change – both immediate and long-term. Their images reveal the camera’s dual role as an objective instrument and a conceptual recorder of the world.

Depictions of children, mothers and acts of caregiving have traditionally been recurring subjects in photographs taken by women. According to art historian Naomi Rosenblum, in the early 1900s the photographing of children, particularly children with their mothers, was deemed by commentators at the time to be ‘an especially appropriate assignment for women’.

While stereotyping and gender bias remained significant obstacles for women photographers in the early twentieth century, many still innovated through their image-making, while studio work provided women artists with the opportunity for financial independence. Subjects were portrayed in intensely intimate portraits, making visible the people in domestic settings who were often overlooked in photographs and society more broadly.

In Australia, artists such as Olive Cotton produced landscape photography in the dominant Pictorialist style of nostalgic, softly focused images. Everyday, non-professional photography, or vernacular photography, was also widely produced by women photographers of the period. As shown by Inez McPhee’s photo albums depicting the outdoor adventures of the Melbourne Walking Club and Edna Walling’s albums filled with pictures of friends, animals and plants, photography became an increasingly popular way of documenting daily life.

‘There is more, much more in the photo question than the mere ability to make a technically perfect photo or picture,’ wrote New Zealand photographer May Moore in a 1916 essay. ‘And when it comes to successfully managing a studio of one’s own, one wants to be many-sided indeed … The woman who is to succeed … must make up her mind to equip on all points just as the men do.’

Women-run photography studios emerged as early as the 1850s in places such as England, Japan, Germany and the United States. However, women faced many barriers to operating their own studios well into the twentieth century, and many had to rely on family support. Photographers such as Ruth Hollick, Karimeh Abbud and Hedda Morrison persevered to successfully manage or independently run photography studios in the 1920s–40s. They produced a wide range of images, from those made for commercial and tourist purposes to documentary, artistic and personal photographs.

The primary aim of social documentary photography is to draw attention to social issues, often to promote social or political change. This style of photography blossomed during the tumultuous period of the 1930s, when photographers were commissioned by the United States government to document the effects of the Great Depression. The increased popularity of illustrated mass media such as newspapers and magazines also allowed for the broad dissemination of social documentary images and texts.

The ability of social documentary photography to present a purely objective representation of people or places continues to be fertile ground for debate today.

The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was established in 1937 as part of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal economic reforms, which provided relief to farmers left impoverished by the hardships of the Great Depression. Led by Roy Stryker, the FSA’s photography program was to be one of the most influential social documentary projects ever developed. Many images were reproduced in newspapers and periodicals to show the harsh realities of life for those living in poverty, with the aim of encouraging public support for the government’s economic policies.

The program ran as part of several government agencies, including the Resettlement Administration (1935–37), then the Farm Security Administration (1937–42) and the Office of War Information (1942–44). Stryker hired a range of photographers for the project and, despite their being given comparable briefs, the unique eye of each photographer is apparent in the over 175,000 pictures produced by the project.

As well as forming a comprehensive pictorial record of American life from 1935 to 1944, the FSA photography program generated some of the most recognisable documentary photographs of the twentieth century, including images by women such as Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott and Marjory Collins.

Many postwar street photographers captured their subjects in the ‘instant’. By embracing close-looking, artists relied on chance to create spontaneous compositions, capturing candid, everyday moments. Photographers such as Diane Arbus worked on the streets of New York City, creating vivid portraits of contemporary American life. Arbus often collaborated with her subjects, producing striking images in the moment or curating compositions for magazine commissions.

Fashion photography was on the rise in the period, with American publications such as Harper’s Bazaar playing a pivotal role in amplifying the art form. Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Lillian Bassman and Toni Frissell were regular contributors to the magazine. Their photographs depicted the idealistic and aspirational modern woman.

Yamazawa Eiko and Tokiwa Toyoko were trailblazing women photographers working in Japan at the same time. Their works reflect the social changes of postwar Japan, expressed through the medium of the photobook.

The 1960s and 1970s saw extraordinary social change around the world. Political activism was on the rise, stemming from the anti–Vietnam War movement. There was an increased consciousness around racial equality, feminism and LGBTQ rights. Photographers also documented the popularisation of alternative ways of living, such as shared housing and collective lifestyles, with images that sometimes appeared in counterculture publications.

Australian women photographers working during this period were among the first to gain access to tertiary photography education. Among the key ideas that emerged through the work of these artists was a focus on community, personal relationships and everyday life.

This exhibition culminates in 1975, a watershed year. It marked the first International Women’s Year, inaugurated through the first UN World Conference on Women, and the height of second-wave feminism. That year the NGV staged the exhibition Six Australian Women Photographers, sometimes referenced as Wimmin, featuring work by Marion Marrison, Melanie Nunn, Fiona Hall, Melanie Le Guay, Ingeborg Tyssen and Jacqueline Mitelman. Fifty years on, many of the images from that exhibition are included here, presented alongside work from the artists’ peers.