The seventh art, as well as several other areas, is always led by male characters.
Around the universe of photography, a myth has been created that there are not many women in the business, which is a big lie. They exist, but they just don’t have the same visibility as the work of male photographers.
That’s why we have separated here 10 amazing female photographers for you to know more about their work and life:
- Gerda Taro
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Born in Germany, Gerda has always shown great interest in politics and social movements. With the arrival of Nazism in the country, she fled to France, where she would meet her future husband, Robert Capa. Taro shaped her career around war photography. Within the industry, she pioneered and modernized this type of photography. Along with Capa, she was responsible for documenting the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Robert Capa and Gerda Taro worked together until Gerda’s death, in 1937, when she was hit by a war tank. However, her role as a photographer and revolutionary of the area is unknown for many people, and she is known only as the great love of Robert Capa, who became an acclaimed photographer worldwide.
- Annie Leibovitz
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Annie is an American photographer, born in Connecticut, is considered one of the best and greatest photographers in America. In her career, she is known for her portraits, and has been responsible for eternalizing in her photographs several celebrities and presidents. From chief of photography at Rolling Stones to photographer at Vanity Fair, one of her most famous works was with John Lennon, photographing him several times, including the morning of the day of his death.
- Ruth Orkin
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Responsible for freezing a moment in which every woman is able to identify herself, Ruth entered history after photographing her friend walking the streets of Florence after World War II, surrounded by male looks. Orkin worked for the New York Times and co-directed an Oscar-nominated film. Also, before her death, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York held an exhibition with her work. In her career, she also photographed several important personalities of the time, such as Marlon Brando and Alfred Hitchcock. She was also the winner of three renowned photography awards. However, her work is always remembered as only “An American Girl In Italy”.
- Linda McCartney
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Always associated with the image of her husband and former Beatle, Paul McCartney, Linda was much more than that. She was a photographer, musician, animal rights activist, mother and entrepreneur. In her photographic career, she became known for her portraits of the greatest musicians and bands of the time, such as Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young. In addition, she was responsible for many of the photographs from the Beatles’ late years, portraying the band’s daily life in the studios. Even while pursuing her music career with Wings, Linda continued to use her lenses to document her family’s personal life with Paul McCartney, a work that has won several exhibitions and books. Linda McCartney died in 1998 from breast cancer. However, her daughters continue to give continuity and life to her work, always remembering the works of her mother.
- Lalla Essaydi
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Born in Morocco, Lalla Essaydi specialized in rehearsed photographs of Arab women, in order to show the power and manifestation of gender by the pose of the bodies and the use of negative space. It is common to find texts in her photographs, mainly Arabic calligraphy, something that is executed exclusively by men in her country. But, at the same time, the words are indecipherable in an attempt to question authority and meaning. Her work is completely self-bibliographical, portraying her experiences as a woman who grew up in Morocco and lived in Saudi Arabia, a country famous for its policies (or lack of them) regarding women’s rights. She currently lives in New York and was named as #18 in Charchub’s “Top 20 Contemporary Middle Eastern Artists in 2012-2014.”
- Meredith Kohut
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Freelance photographer and regular contributor to The New York Times, Kohut is an American photojournalist based in Caracas, Venezuela, and uses photography to portray the economic and social crisis that the country is facing. Her courage has often led her to face great risk situations. However, she was still responsible for denouncing and making visible countless acts and living conditions that Venezuelans were subjected to, such as her report on the conditions of the country’s mental illness hospitals. In addition to covering the situation in Venezuela, Meredith is also responsible for photographing many events throughout Latin America for the international media. She is the author of several photos about the Cuban transition, the violence in El Salvador, prostitution in Colombia, among many others. However, for the past three years, she has been prioritizing the Venezuelan coverage. Her report that exposed the deaths of hundreds of children from malnutrition in public hospitals placed her as a finalist in the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography in 2018.
- Meeri Koutaniemi
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Meeri is a Finnish photographer whose work already exposes the reality of more than 50 countries by portraying stories of resilience and overcoming spread around the world. One of the biggest issues addressed in her work is the definition of identity. Throughout her career, Koutaniemi has focused on the social side within international conflicts and discrimination, as a form of empowerment and resistance. At the moment, the photographer is developing a long project on female genital mutilation in several countries, bringing a direct approach, but full of respect and integrity. In 2014 Koutaniemi won the Visa D’or Daily Press Award in Perpignan and FreeLens Award in Lumix Photofestival in Hannover.
- Barbara Kruger
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Kruger is an American conceptual artist, also known as the feminist photographer. Her works combine photographs, usually in black and white, with phrases and other materials, creating statements about politics and social issues in evidence. From the junction of these elements, she is able to create the most beautiful and impactful images, collages or any other form of art. The phrases in her constructions are often filled with pronouns such as “you”, “your”, “I” and “us”, being cultural constructions of power, identity and sexuality.
- Alice Martins
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Brazilian, Alice lived in South Africa between 2004 and 2005, photo-documenting AIDS and socio-educational programs in the African continent. Currently, she lives in Iraq and is responsible for covering humanitarian crises and armed conflicts in the Middle East, such as the war in Syria and the war against Isis in Iraq. She works as a collaborator at Harper’s, Time, Stern, Newsweek and the Washington Post, and is one of the few Latin American professionals working in the Middle East. In her photographs, she has the ability to portray beauty and a strange tranquility in the midst of chaos.
- Nan Goldin
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Goldin grew up in an upper middle class Jewish family in Boston, Massachusetts and was introduced to the world of photography for the first time at age 15 by a teacher, thus discovering his passion. She is considered the most influential photographer of the 1950s, and gained her fame by documenting her adventures within the city’s gay and transgender communities. Upon graduating, Nan moved to New York City and emerged into the new-wave post-punk universe and gay subculture in the early 1980s. In 2004, from her series “Sisters, Saints & Sybils”, she watches and portrays the suicide of her own sister, Barbara, only 18 years old. Her works are marked by sexuality, transgression and drug abuse, besides being able to expose in the photograph a kind of raw emotion, which transports you into her in the most realistic way possible.
Every day, there are thousands of extremely talented women venturing into the incredible world of photography, in search of being able to portray the world we live from their point of view and thus be able to revolutionize it. It is important, especially in today’s world, that we support these professionals so that they have the visibility they deserve and that myth that they do not exist is extinguished.
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The article above was edited by Marina Ponchio.
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