What is a feminist image? A century of female photographers in pictures | Art and design

A wealth of imagery from Caribbean schoolgirls and disembodied doll parts to the Nicaraguan revolution features in this celebration of women behind the camera at New Yorks Museum of Modern Art

What is a feminist image? A century of female photographers – in pictures

A wealth of imagery – from Caribbean schoolgirls and disembodied doll parts to the Nicaraguan revolution – features in this celebration of women behind the camera at New York’s Museum of Modern Art

Main image: Turning the table … Untitled (Woman and Daughter With Makeup), 1990 Photograph: Carrie Mae Weems

Thu 11 Aug 2022 07.00 BST

  • Untitled (Masked Self-Portrait, Dessau), 1930, by Gertrud Arndt

    ‘When I see a woman behind the camera, I see a woman in a position of power. That, to me, speaks to feminism,’ writes art collector Helen Kornblum, who donated these photographs, and others by women, to MoMA. ‘All the images are organised around this question: “What is a feminist picture?”’ Our Selves: Photographs by Women Artists from Helen Kornblum features 90 photographic works by female artists from the last 100 years. At the Museum of Modern Art, New York, until 10 October

  • Aveux non Avenus (Disavowels or Cancelled Confessions), 1930, by Claude Cahun

    Between the world wars, photographers created new consumer desires through images for the illustrated press. The media’s use of the female figure was also a serious subject for critique. Cahun explored modes of self-presentation that defied the mass media’s typical depiction of women as figures merely meant to catch the eye of male viewers. In the 1970s and 80s, conceptual artists such as Silvia Kolbowski continued to challenge these cliches by combining, as Cahun did, image and text

  • Doll Parts, c 1938, by Kati Horna

    How have female artists used photography as a tool of resistance? Our Selves brings images that span more than 100 years of photography into dialogue with each other. All of them were made by women who have responded to asymmetrical systems of power and have reframed gender and subjectivity in the process. Modernist artists in the first half of the 20th century interrogated the politics of the gaze and explored new forms of address in portraiture, documentary images, and advertising

  • School Girl, St Croix, 1963, by Consuelo Kanaga

    Contemporary artists have highlighted the intersections of women’s rights, diasporic histories, and Indigenous sovereignty through oblique fabulation, queer language and performative actions. The exhibition is not a chronological history of female photographers, nor is it a historical account of feminist photography. Rather, Our Selves is an invitation to look at pictures through a contemporary feminist lens

  • Reina (Queen), 1989, by Flor Garduño

    In the 1980s and early 90s, many artists explored the interrelated histories of colonialism and patriarchy in Latin America. Garduño’s intimate portraiture meditates on the adaptations of ancient cultural rituals in contemporary life, with the figures of women of Indigenous heritage at the centre

  • Untitled (Woman and Daughter With Makeup), 1990, by Carrie Mae Weems

    In this image, one of 20 in Weems’s Kitchen Table Series, the artist sits at the head of a table, applying makeup, with the help of a small vanity mirror. Next to her, a young girl looking at her own reflection puts on lipstick in a parallel gesture. The tender scene illustrates one of the ways in which gender is learned and performed, while also celebrating the private subjectivity, beauty and inner lives of Black women

  • Vanna Brown, Azteca Style, 1990, by Hulleah J Tsinhnahjinnie

    Tsinhnahjinnie, a Seminole-Muscogee-Diné (Navajo) artist, has wittily recast Wheel of Fortune gameshow star Vanna White as an Indigenous woman, a satirical choice that highlights the invisibility of Native Americans in the mass media and the stereotypes that are routinely employed when they do appear. In contradicting these fictions, which are rooted in America’s colonial history, her work claims visual sovereignty and self-determination for Indigenous people – the right to decide how they are represented

  • Fatman With Edith, 1993, by Meridel Rubenstein

    With this photograph, Rubenstein conflates war with the feminine. She has the inhuman, destructive warhead, the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki, called Fat Man, juxtaposed with a portrait of a woman, Edith Warner, and a nurturing, warm cup of tea

  • Interior Cartography #35, 1996, by Tatiana Parcero

    Tatiana Parcero says: ‘I’m from Mexico and I’m a visual artist and a psychologist. Cartography is a science that deals with maps. I am interested in working with the body as a territory, where I can explore different paths at a physical and also symbolic level. I am the one that appears in all the photographs. When I did this specific shot, I wanted to show a moment of introspection and calm. And when you see my hands near my cheeks, I wanted to represent a way to be in touch with myself in a more spiritual way’

  • A Funeral Procession in Jinotepe for Assassinated Student Leaders, 1978, by Susan Meiselas

    Demonstrators carry a photograph of Arlen Siu, an FSLN guerilla fighter killed in the mountains of Nicaragua three years earlier. Meiselas’s photographs reveal a nation in turmoil. Meiselas, one of the few photojournalists to have documented the Nicaraguan revolution, mostly used colour film. She later reflected that ‘the vibrancy and optimism of the resistance, as well as the physical feel of the place, came through better in colour’

  • Wakeah, from the series First American Girl, 2018, by Cara Romero

    Romero’s First American Girl series – a nod to the popular doll brand – counters pop culture representations of Native Americans with authentic detail. Wakeah shows Wakeah Jhane, a Comanche-Blackfeet-Kiowa ledger artist and dancer, wearing buckskin dance regalia that asserts the specificity of her Native culture, the artistry of regional handicraft traditions, and the creative power of Native women. The image’s diorama-style arrangement evokes the ways in which Indigenous people are depicted as anthropological specimens

  • Untitled, 2010, by Sharon Lockhart

    What appears to be a serene domestic interior – the artist’s niece working on a jigsaw puzzle – contains allusions to darker histories. Hanging on the wall is a colonial-era map of the Maine coastline, and the puzzle reproduces a painting by Winslow Homer, whose iconic seascapes portrayed New England as an idyllic land ‘discovered’ by hardy explorers. Homer’s work did not acknowledge the deadly wars fought over the territory, nor the near annihilation of the Wabanaki people, the region’s Indigenous inhabitants
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