Photographs by Women 1930-1980′ an eclectic survey

By Mary Sue Mohnke

In the late 1930s, when she was photographing her monumental “Changing New York” series, Berenice Abbott told a senior official from the Federal Art Project that she had taken some photographs in the Bowery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

“Nice girls shouldn’t go to the Bowery,” the official warned.

“I’m not a nice girl, I’m a photographer,” Abbott replied.

A similar retort could conceivably have come from many of the 21 women photographers, some renowned, others little known, whose work is featured in the exhibition “Not Nice Girls: Photographs by Women 1930-1980” at the Kelmscott Gallery.

Among those featured in the 66-image exhibit are Abbott, Lisette Model, Diane Arbus, Gisele Freund, Lilo Raymond, and Chicagoans Jane Wenger and Diane Schmidt.

“The whole point of the exhibition is that you can look at all these photographs and not be aware that women took them,” says Scott Elliott, owner of the Kelmscott Gallery. “I’m against the idea of an all-woman, all-Czech, all-black or all-anything show. Too often, the quality is uneven.

“But the one thing the diverse photographs in this exhibition have in common is quality. No one style, point of view, or subject matter identifies these photographs as being taken by women.”

The 50-year span this eclectic exhibit considers was a period when photography came into its own as both a profession and art. It was also a time when increasing numbers of women were beginning to find personal and professional fulfillment outside the home.

Featured prominently in the exhibit is Lisette Model, who is best known for taking an unblinking and often discomfiting look at people on the streets of Nice, France, and New York in the 1930s and ’40s. Model prettifies no one.

A smiling, heavyset woman on the beach at Coney Island, standing as baseball outfielders often do, with veined legs wide apart and hands on knees, possesses enviable dignity, as seen by Model. Wearing a fedora that’s one size too small, a short man with a large nose and sad eyes looks out onto a New York street while leaning on a stair baluster. On Nice’s Promenade des Anglais, a heavy woman in a flowered dress and a clashing, wide-brimmed hat peers pleasantly into the camera.

The people Model chose to photograph came from all strata of society; they have in common a richness of character that makes an indelible impression. While some of her subjects welcomed Model with a steady gaze, most seem completely unaware Of the photographer’s presence. Model, who taught photography at the New School for Social Research in New York City for more than 30 years, once advised, “It is not important whether one likes or dislikes a photograph; the important thing is to find out what it’s all about.”

This is apt advice for anyone viewing Model’s work. While many of her characters repel at first glance, most of them appear, through both dress and visage, to have an unwavering sense of who they are. It’s up to viewers to imagine how they achieved that state of mind.

Arbus was Model’s best-known student and a close friend as well. A former fashion photographer, she concentrated on those who existed outside of mainstream society in photographs that often exaggerate the distance between subject and everyday life. Arbus committed suicide in 1971.

In one Arbus photograph, a transvestite missing a couple of teeth lies across a bed, a birthday cake nearby. Four balloons are taped to the wall, along with five greeting cards and a pinup girl calendar. Toiletries are stored on a chair and on a dresser that’s missing half its drawer pulls. To the observer, the hotel room is a scene of unremitting gloom, yet it is a celebration.

Abbott, who persuaded her friend Model to join her on the photography faculty at the New School for Social Research, worked in three main modes. Her street scenes, portraiture, and science work are all represented in the exhibit, the latter two by just one image each.

No matter what her subject, Abbott had an unwavering devotion to realism. Her Changing New York portfolio, the work for which she’s best known, was funded by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. It has been showcased in many exhibitions, magazine features, and a 1939 book of the same name.

Using an 8-by-10-inch view camera, Abbott documented New York in richly detailed photographs that possess a sense of wonder at the city’s vitality, grand scale, and inevitable surrender to the skyscraper. Her excruciatingly detailed photograph of The Stuyvesant Curiosity Shop, which offered bargains in diamonds, watches and jewelry, 100,000 used tools, shotguns, fishing rods, guitars, telescopes, and binoculars, is a reminder of not just a changed New York, but a changed America.

One of her best-known photographs shows a realistic-looking, gun-shaped sign in sharp focus pointing toward a more softly focused police station across the street.

Explaining her motivation for the New York project, Abbott said at the time, “To photograph New York City means to seek to catch in the sensitive and delicate photographic emulsion the spirit of the metropolis, while remaining true to its essential fact, its hurrying tempos, its congested streets, the past jostling the present.” At this, she succeeded brilliantly.

While Abbott was photographing New York, German-born Gisele Freund was in Paris working as a photojournalist and taking portraits, mainly of artists and writers.

She began experimenting in 1938 with using small-size American- and German-made color film in her Leica camera. There was little demand for color work then because most newspapers and magazines were not equipped to reproduce color photographs.

Freund called her portrait of French author Paul Val ry, her first color portrait, “an absolute revelation.” “Gone were the days of seeing things in highlights and shadows: one now saw them in tonalities,” she exulted.

She soon began photographing French literary figures in color. Novelist Colette appears pensive and attractive in Freund’s well-known 1939 portrait of her (see cover of today’s Friday section). The colors in the dye transfer print are muted and lifelike.

German-born Lilo Raymond, who was 17 when she emigrated to the U.S. in 1939, didn’t turn her full attention to photography until she was in her late 30s. The New York photographer’s still lifes of everyday objects often include slivers and patterns of light that suggest a moment fully realized.

Among Raymond’s subjects, which she calls “the quieter evidences of people,” are 10 eggs in a round, low-sided earthenware crock. Each egg catches the light a bit differently, and none of them appears to be touching any other.

Another Raymond still life features a small, speckled fish that is a few inches longer than the oval, dark-enameled casserole dish in which it lies. The fish’s spots are echoed in the granite like table on which the casserole rests.

Contrasting mightily with Raymond’s quietude is Chicagoan Jane Wenger, known for her daring series featuring faceless nudes, bald heads, self-portraits, and faces. All of her work is beautifully printed.