Navigation

We borrow our title from Frances Benjamin Johnston’s “What Women Can Do with a Camera,” a 1897 essay on the potentialities of a medium that promised equality and inclusion. This panel explores the way modern and contemporary women photographers in Latin America have actualized the potentialities of the medium, framing the world in their own poetic and inquisitive ways. Covering from the 1930s to the present, we examine the way the female gaze interrogates politics, bodies, time, and photography itself. A common thread in these papers is the way in which materiality defines and intervenes in a range of experiences, from exile to solidarity, from desire to mourning, so as to help us better see the world through the eyes of women.