‘Let Us At Least Begin:’ Institutional Politics in American Feminist Photography, 1980-1984

Martha Rosler’s announcement of the Women’s Caucus’ first meeting at the 1980 national conference of the Society for Photographic Education was part of her attempt to grow a socialist-feminist movement within the arts. In a professional organization that materially rewarded creative individuals, the Caucus enumerated how the SPE’s celebration of the photographer’s expression (authorship) fueled men’s photographic and physical objectification of women’s bodies and thus prevented women from succeeding as expressing subjects. This paper recovers feminist photographers’ complex negotiations surrounding authorship, in the years of the art world’s turn to photography as paradigmatically postmodern for its transcriptive (unauthored) qualities. I conduct a close reading of two competing feminist issues of the SPE’s journal Exposure: Gretchen Garner’s “Women in Photography” (1981) and the Caucus’ “What you staring AT” (1984). My analysis shows that while the most tendentious issue between Caucus and non-Caucus women was men’s inclusion in feminist programs, these arguments depended on competing models concerning women’s connection to their work. Contending that women augured a return to “iconography not style ... content not form,” Garner sustained the SPE’s investment in individual authorship while critiquing misogynistic content choices. Alternatively, Caucus members called for an authorship shared between photographers, subjects, and communities – and their vociferous resistance to men’s demands for inclusion in Caucus meetings sought to protect the intimate equity needed in such collaborations. By recovering feminist photography’s original rhetorics and social networks, I ground a transformative moment in aesthetic theory within the working lives of artists struggling for institutional inclusion.