Australian Womens Historical Photography: Other Times, Other Views examines the photographs produced by six talented women photographers against the historical backdrop of settler violence towards Indigenous Australians, the First Womens Movement, the Great War of 19141918, Australias imperial occupation of New Guinea, the final years of Chinese Nationalist Party rule in China and debates about photographys status as an art form. Womens works from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been down-played or even ignored in existing accounts of Australias cultural history, and this study is aimed at rectifying this situation. At the same time, the book demonstrates why amateur works are just as important as commercial works to our understanding of the past.
Methodologically, the book draws on scholarship from history, art history, anthropology, sociology, gender studies and cultural studies to create an interdisciplinary critical framework that will be of interest to a broad range of academic and archival researchers. It is also a framework that is critically sensible of its own groundings in the postcolonial and feminist present thereby reflecting what is meaningful at any given historical moment.
Finally, this book responds to the pronounced lack of visibility of Australian realist, documentary and commercial womens works. The few histories of Australian womens photography that exist pay more attention to modernist and contemporary works, and when they do mention earlier women photographers works, they seldom go into much detail. They also ignore the works of the earliest Indigenous women photographers, women who traveled and made photographs abroad. By presenting a carefully contextualized and detailed study of works by six Australian women photographers who worked in the late colonial era and whose works in all sorts of small and surprising ways chronicled the impacts of some of the periods more disturbing as well as enlightened events, we will not only add to knowledge of Australian womens photography, we will also broaden and enrich the frames of womens photography and Australian history more generally.