As a teacher of women’s studies, and a feminist, I often refer to “the gender lens.”  The term refers to the idea of adopting metaphorical spectacles through which to view the world so that you start seeing things through a special filter in a new light.  That light illuminates women’s experiences, needs and perceptions while revealing the realities, needs and perceptions of men in new ways too.  Our vision becomes refined and more acute when donning these spectacles.  Often it grows clearer, more compassionate and humanistic.

Looking at the world through the lens of gender allowed Jean Kilbourne, for example, to shine light on the world of advertising in a way that no one had done before her. She demonstrated through her writing and classic video series “Killing Us Softly” that women were being trivialized, objectified, and sexualized by corporate advertising that seemed clever and remained subliminal  - until the gender lens revealed how alarming and often sexual or violent it really was (and still is). 

But there is another gender lens that bears noting and it can be found on the other side of the camera.  Think of Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Diane Arbus and other less well-recognizable women photographers.

Lange and Bourke-White were social realists whose visionary work revealed what Henry James referred to in literature as an “air of reality.”  Like these two iconic photographers, James embraced an aesthetic of realism, which valued accurate representations of the psychological and material realities of American life.

Lange, in particular, dedicated herself to the “show-don’t-tell” reality of such historically important times as the Dust Bowl and Depression-era days.  Committed to revealing the hardships visited upon poor migrants, she unfailingly afforded her subjects dignity and respect.  As her biographer Linda Gordon pointed out in “Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits,”  Lange and her contemporary Esther Bubley refused to accept myths like the one that held that the nuclear family was the only “normal” family form and muscular man the quintessential worker.  In photographing migrant farm workers, Lange showed that “family” had many forms.  Women’s strength was made clear: Lange and Bubley observed that men were usually more fragile emotionally than their counterparts.  

By offering us a literal gender lens, Lange and Bubley were able to provide true insight into the impact of economic insecurity and its trauma on both women and men.  With respect for everyone affected by poverty, they showed us what it looks like to be frightened, unbearably fatigued and marginal.  They went beyond visible surfaces to reveal and explore the complexities, context, and unconscious desires of the characters in their visual narratives.  Through their commitment to documenting the reality of everyday struggles among their subjects they offered the world penetrating insight into inequalities in American life.

Lange went on to document strikes, breadlines, and Japanese-American relocation camps. Her photographs revealing the effects of Japanese-American policy were so damning the Army impounded them during the war.  Margaret Bourke-White gave us something new with her iconic imagery of industrial America, making us feel both proud and punished by technology. A pioneering photojournalist, she exposed 1930s Russia, the horrors of World War II and Depression-era America as no one else had.

These women, along with others such as the late Japanese-American Masumi Hayashi, whose work focused on prisons and other uncomfortable, inhumane spaces, paved the way for contemporary women photographic artists.  Marion Palfi, for example, worked to combine her art form with social research.  One of her iconic images is the 1940s picture “Wife of a Lynch Victim” in her book Invisible in America. Social documentarian Mary Ellen Mark, whose work explores homelessness, addiction, mental illness and teenage pregnancy, observes from the inside.  In 1976 she spent 36 days in the women’s maximum security section of an Oregon mental institution.

Some women photographers like Rosalind Solomon travel abroad to capture images of “the other.”  Some, like Catherine Wagner and Laurie Brown, focus on landscape to reveal life as it is altered by the human footprint.  A rich and largely invisible cadre of female photographers exists who have much to show us about the world in which we live.  More now than ever their work needs to be seen, understood and appreciated.

Diane Arbus once said, “There are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.”  Thankfully, she and others like her took their pictures.  We would know so much less of the world without their gendered lenses.

Perhaps we need now to ask ourselves what we would see if women like Lange and Bubley were still photographing this troubled 21^st century world?  If we donned those special spectacles and started to see the world in a new light, might our vision be clearer, more compassionate and more humane?

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