1. Noel, Bernard, “The Eye's Touch,” trans. Chevallier, Sheila and Faure, Marianne Tinnell, introduction to The Nude (New York: Pantheon, 1981), n.p.Google Scholar

2. Foucault, Michel, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. Smith, A. M. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1973), pp. xiii–xiv.Google Scholar

3. Banta, Martha, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 14.Google Scholar

4. Trachtenberg, Alan, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), pp. 173–75.Google Scholar

5. My focus here is on representations of the nude female body. Nude males were also the subject of photographs made at this time, for example by Thomas Eakins and Eadweard Muybridge, discussed below, and F. Holland Day, who photographed his own naked body.

6. Parker, Rozika and Pollock, Griselda, Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul/Pantheon, 1981), p. 115.Google Scholar

7. Gover, C. Jane's The Positive Image: Women Photographers in Turn of the Century America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988)Google Scholar was in press when I began this work; it provides a good historical overview of women photographers in this period but does not take up the theoretical issues with which I am concerned. Another valuable resource is Naef, Weston's The Collection of Alfred Stieglitz (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Viking, 1978).Google Scholar

8. This is Joan Wallach Scott's criticism (on p. 40) of Gilligan, Carol's In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).Google ScholarScott, 's Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)Google Scholar has been helpful in thinking through the problem of essentialism.

9. Sontag, Susan, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973)Google Scholar; Berger, John and Mohr, Jean, Another Way of Telling (New York: Pantheon, 1982)Google Scholar; Trachtenberg, Alan, Reading American PhotographsGoogle Scholar, which includes revisions of important essays that have appeared over the last decade in the Massachusetts Review (Winter 1978)Google Scholar, Representations (Winter 1985)Google Scholar, and other journals and books. See also Shloss, Carol, In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

10. Krauss, Rosalind, “Photography's Discursive Spaces,” in The Origins of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Sekula, Allan, “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal 41, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 15–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tagg, John, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Trachtenberg, 's Reading American PhotographsGoogle Scholar; Laura Wexler's review of Tagg, , “Photographies and Histories/Coming into Being,” exposure 27, no. 2 (1989): 38–44Google Scholar; and Wexler, 's “Material and Ideological Subtexts of Photography at Turn of the Century: A Comparative Approach,” paper presented at the 1989 ASA/CAAS conference, Toronto.Google Scholar See also Holland, Patricia, Spence, Jo, and Watney, Simon, eds., Photography/Politics: One and Photography/Politics: Two (London: Comedia, 1986).Google Scholar Three new collections of essays have been published since this essay was written. Bolton, Richard's The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989)Google Scholar and Squier, Carol's The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990)Google Scholar contain some feminist approaches to photography. Especially important is Solomon-Godeau, Abigail's Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).Google Scholar

11. The literature of feminist film criticism is by now too extensive to cite here. Seminal, often cited essays include Laura Mulvey, 's “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kaplan, E. Ann's “Is the Gaze Male?” in Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (New York: Methuen, 1983), pp. 23–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Doane, Mary Ann's “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” Screen 23, nos. 3–4 (09–10 1982): 74–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarMulvey, 's “Visual Pleasure”Google Scholar is reprinted with a revision of her earlier position in “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).Google ScholarWilliams, Linda's “Film Body”Google Scholar is cited in note 23.

The word theory is bound historically to the gaze in Western culture, Page duBois notes: “The observers, the witnesses, the beholders of the world have been both male and female, but only the male spectators, the theòroi [in ancient Greece], have been official ambassadors, named to see.” Feminists need not dismiss theory, she points out, but need to find a place from which to see, to observe not sameness but difference-historical difference. Going on to describe the way in which male theorists - Freud, Lacan - have most often seen sameness, she argues for a historicizing of psychoanalysis, for a recognition that “the ideology about gender difference, which in capitalist culture supports all other versions of hierarchical difference, is a cultural product.” Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 10.Google Scholar

12. Kaplan, , Women and Film, p. 13.Google Scholar The definitions that follow are drawn from this work.

13. Kaplan, , Women and Film, p. 13.Google Scholar

14. Kaplan, , Women and Film, p. 15.Google Scholar

15. Letter from Wexler, Laura to the author, 08 16, 1989.Google Scholar

16. The very word landscape implies that the scene framed in the window behind the model has also been shaped into an artifact by human work, just as she herself is being turned into something to look at. The pitcher is an old and oftenused symbol of woman's body, probably originating with Rebecca at the well in Genesis.

17. Banta, Martha, Imaging American Women, p. 213.Google Scholar

18. “So many aspects of Renaissance culture, its painting, its literature, its historiography are born of this perception [that man is the measure of all things] of an active confidence in human powers,” Alpers writes. “And so much are we heir to this view of man, or more particularly so much are art historians heir to this view of artistic representation, that it is hard to see it as a particular modality and not just the way representational art is.” She goes on to link the problems posed by photography to this mode of visualization, of representation. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 43.Google Scholar

19. Banta, , Imaging American Women, pp. 14–15, 213.Google Scholar Banta draws here on Charles Saunders Peirce's argument that signs, images, and types speak to truths that lie fully within the scope of human experience. Peirce had by 1868 developed his theory about the relation between object (the thing or signifier, that arouses interest), representation (the sign that stands for the object's signified meaning), and interpretant (the person who appraises the arousing sign). This relation leads not only to the assignment of meaning to the object, but also influences the way we behave toward that object (Imaging American Women, pp. 13–14).Google Scholar

20. Snyder, Joel and Allen, Neil Walsh, “Photography, Vision, and Representation,” reprinted from Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1975)Google Scholar in Reading into Photography: Selected Esays, 1959–1980, ed. Barrow, Thomas, Armitage, Shelley, and Tydeman, William E. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), p. 70.Google Scholar Snyder and Allen take issue here with Arnheim, 's “On the Nature of Photography” Critical Inquiry 1, no. 1 [09 1974]: 149–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, from which the words in single quotation marks come.

21. In addition to Walsh/Allen and Arnheim, cited above, see Bazin, Andrè, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema? trans. Gray, Hugh (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Cavell, Stanley, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New York: Viking, 1971)Google Scholar; Kracauer, Siegfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960)Google Scholar; and, most recently, Tagg, , The Burden of Representation.Google Scholar

22. Snyder, and Allen, , “Photography,” p. 75.Google Scholar

23. Williams, Linda, “Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions,” Cine-Tracts 12 3, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 22–28.Google Scholar

24. Barthes, Roland, The Pleasures of the Text, trans. Miller, Richard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 10.Google Scholar

25. Berger, John, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 54.Google Scholar

26. Banta, , “Introduction: Object, Image, Type, and the Conduct of Life,” Imaging American Women, pp. 1–45.Google Scholar

27. Banta, , Imaging American Women, p. 13.Google Scholar

28. “My consolation now is in the Greek Slave! Take the earliest time to see her when in Boston for you will never have enough,” Ellen Sturgis Hooper (mother of Marian Hooper Adams, photographer and wife of Henry Adams) wrote to Carrie Sturgis. Cited in Kaledin, Eugenia, The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), p. 230.Google Scholar Women of this period also identified with Hosmer, Harriet's manacled Queen Zenobia.Google Scholar See Sherman, Claire R., Women as Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820–1979 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981).Google Scholar

29. Banta, , Imaging American Women, p. 1.Google Scholar See also Dijkstra, Bram, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

30. Stieglitz, Alfred, “Four Happenings,” Twice-a-Year 8–9 (1942): 130Google Scholar, cited in Shloss, , In Visible Light, pp. 108–109.Google Scholar

31. “Alfred Stieglitz and His Latest Work,” Photographic Times 28 (04 1896): 161Google Scholar, cited in Trachtenberg, , Reading American Photographs, p. 184.Google Scholar

32. Cited in Norman, Dorothy, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (New York: Random House, 1960), p. 39, emphasis added.Google Scholar

33. Berger, , Ways of Seeing, pp. 57–58.Google Scholar

34. Sontag, , On Photography, p. 6.Google Scholar Much new work has been done recently on FSA photographers. See Shloss, , In Visible LightGoogle Scholar, chs. 5 and 6; Levine, Lawrence, “The Historian and the Icon: Photography and the History of the American People in the 1930s and 1940s,”Google Scholar and Trachtenberg, Alan, “From Image to Story: Reading the File,” in Documenting America, ed. Fleischhauer, Carl and Brannan, Beverly W. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 15–42, 43–73Google Scholar; Daniel, Pete, Foresta, Merry, Stange, Maren, and Stein, Sally, Official Images: New Deal Photography (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Fisher, Andrea, Let Us Now Praise Famous Women: Women Photographers for the US Government, 1935–1944 (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul/Pandora, 1987).Google Scholar

35. There is very likely a good reason why Henry Adams skipped the photography exhibit – the depression and suicide in 1885 of his photographer-wife, Marian, (“Clover”)Google Scholar Hooper Adams, caused by her swallowing the potassium cyanide she used in developing photographs. Henry Adams had discouraged her work, preventing the publication of her impressive photograph of George Bancroft, for example. He wrote to Gilder, Richard Watson, editor of The CenturyGoogle Scholar Magazine, using the editorial “we”: “You know our modesty… [and we decline to] flaunt… our photographs in The Century” (cited in Kaledin, , Education of Mrs. Henry Adams, p. 191).Google Scholar The photographer's husband had little respect for photography as an art -he had ridiculed Emerson for either “extreme sublimation or tenuity of intelligence for asserting that photographs gave more pleasure than paintings,” and after his wife's death declared, “I hate photographs, abstractly because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I should ever get by imagination” (cited in Levenson, J. C., The Mind and Art of Henry Adams [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957], p. 10).Google Scholar

36. Information about this exhibit is drawn from Quitslund, Toby, Frances Benjamin Johnston and Her Feminine Colleagues, published with Women Artists in Washington Collections (College Park, Md.: University of Maryland Art Gallery and Women's Caucus for Art, exhibition catalogue, 1979).Google Scholar A collection of letters from exhibitors to Johnston is in the Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division.

37. Quitslund, , Frances Benjamin Johnston, pp. 99–100.Google Scholar Alice Austin of Boston is not to be confused with Alice Austen of Staten Island, New York, who produced a wealth of images of women engaged in various types of communal, even intimate activities - athletic, social, travel, and play - but whose work was not part of the exhibition that Johnston organized in 1900. Austen is worth a study of her own. See Novotny, Ann, Alice's World: The Life and Photography of an American Original, Alice Austen, 1866–1952 (Old Greenwich, Conn.: Chatham Press, 1976)Google Scholar; and Gover, , The Positive Image, pp. 115–23.Google Scholar

38. Quitslund, , Frances Benjamin Johnston, p. 103.Google Scholar

39. Quitslund, , Frances Benjamin Johnston, pp. 100–102.Google Scholar

40. On the system of patronage and tradition operative in museums of fine art, see Wolfe, Tom, The Painted Word (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975).Google Scholar

41. Jenkins, Reese, Images and Enterprise: Technology and the American Photographic Industry, 1839–1925 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).Google Scholar See also the collections by Bolton, Solomon-Godeau, and Squiers cited in note 10.

42. Cited in Quitslund, , Frances Benjamin Johnston, p. 103.Google Scholar

43. Cited in Quitslund, , Frances Benjamin Johnston, p. 142.Google Scholar

44. Cited in Glenn, Constance W. and Rice, Leland, Frances Benjamin Johnston: Women of Class and Station (Long Beach, Calif.: California State University Art Museum and Galleries, 1979), p. 6.Google Scholar

45. Camera Work 1 (01 1903): 20.Google Scholar

46. Stieglitz, Alfred “Our Illustrations,” Camera Notes 3 (07 1899): 24Google Scholar, cited in Michaels, Barbara L., “Rediscovering Gertrude Käsebier,” Image 19, no. 2 (06 1976): 23.Google Scholar

47. The name “Photo-Secession” originated with Stieglitz's naming a show of the National Arts Club in 1902 “American Pictorial Photography Arranged by the ‘Photo-Secession.’” Käsebier, arriving at the opening, asked Stieglitz, , “What's this Photo-Secession? Am I a photo-secessionist?”Google ScholarStieglitz, asked, “Do you feel you are?”Google Scholar “I do,” she replied. “Well,” he said, “that's all there is to it.” Like the Munich and Vienna Secessions in the fine arts, the American exhibitors stood for the new, the experimental, and the living, “seceding … from the accepted idea of what constitutes a photograph” (Stieglitz, Alfred, “The Photo-Secession,” in American Annual of Photography and Photographic Times Almanac [New York, 1904]Google Scholar; and “Four Happenings,” in Twice-a-Year 8–9 [1942]Google Scholar, cited in Homer, William Innes, Alfred Stieglitz and the American Auant-Garde [Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1977], pp. 28–29).Google Scholar

48. Edgerton, Giles, “Photography as an Emotional Art: A Study of the Work of Gertrude Käsebier,” The Craftsman 12 (04 1907) 1Google Scholar; rept. Image 15, no. 4, (12 1972): 9.Google Scholar See also Corn, Wanda M.'s distinction between sentiment and sentimental in American Tonalism, 1880–1910 (San Francisco: M. H. De Young Memorial Museum, exhibition catalogue, 1972).Google Scholar

49. Baym, Nina, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” American Quarterly 33 (Summer 1981): 123–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50. Trachtenberg, , Reading American PhotographsGoogle Scholar, and Stange, Maren, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, have recently shown that Lewis Hine succeeded in making his subjects co-producers of his photographic images.

51. Cather, Willa, “The Best Short Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett” (1925), in Willa Cather on Writing, ed. Tennant, Stephen (New York: Knopf, 1949), pp. 47–59.Google Scholar

52. Edgerton, , “Photography,” p. 88.Google Scholar

53. Rosenblum, Naomi, “Art Photography: Another Aspect, 1890–1920,” in A World History of Photography (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), p. 299.Google Scholar

54. Caffin, Charles, American Masters of Painting (New York, 1902), p. 13Google Scholar, cited in Corn, Wanda, Tonalism, p. 3.Google Scholar

55. The representation of men's bodies is another topic. I have suggested earlier that Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Eakins, and others photographed their friends' and their own naked bodies.

56. Edgerton, , “Photography,” p. 88.Google Scholar

57. See Kaplan, , Women and Film, p. 26.Google Scholar

58. Gertrude Simmons's article in the Atlantic Monthly (02 1901): 191Google Scholar, cited in Mary E. Young's entry on Bonnin, Gertrude Simmons in Notable American Women (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), vol. 1, pp. 199–200Google Scholar, from which material on Bonnin is drawn.

59. At least according to Doctorow, E. L. in RagtimeGoogle Scholar, but see Baynes, Lillian, “An Artist's Model,” The Illustrated American (10 19, 1895): 497–501Google Scholar, where a model named Minnie Clark is credited as the original Girl, Gibson and Daly, Lillie as Saint-Gaudens, 's Diana.Google Scholar Martha Banta argues that the Gibson Girl was a composite: see p. 10 of this essay and n. 18.

60. Banta, , Imaging American Women, p. 450.Google Scholar

61. Wharton, Edith, The House of Mirth (1905; rept. New York: Scribner's, 1969), p. 3.Google Scholar

62. See, for example, Homer, William Innes, Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession (Boston: Little Brown, 1983), pp. 130–31.Google Scholar

63. Cited in Homer, , Alfred Stieglitz, p. 128.Google Scholar

64. See Berger, , Ways of Seeing, pp. 50–52Google Scholar, on paintings of nude women with mirrors.

65. Dahl-Wolfe, Louise, A Photographer's Scrapbook (London: Quartet Books, 1984), p. 4.Google Scholar Imogen Cunningham also referred to Brigman in her Mt. Rainier series of nude photographs of her husband.

66. Gentile, Mary C., Film Feminisms: Theory and Practice (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), pp. 19–20.Google Scholar

67. This is Shloss, Carol's view in In Visible Light, pp. 260–62.Google Scholar