Documenting the history of American photography – or the history of photography in general – illuminates the role Greenwich Village played the the advent of a new artistic/scientific practice. NYU professors John W. Draper and Samuel F. B. Morse pioneered the American photography movement, conducting the earliest photographic experiments in NYU’s Old Main Building that stood at Washington Square East, between Washington Place and Waverly Place. Atop the building’s roof, Draper captured the first image of a human face, the famous March 1840 sunlit portrait of his bonneted sister, Dorothy Draper. In his 1853 Address to alumni of NYU, John Draper recounted the central role the University’s laboratory in the Old Main Building played in his and Morse’s daguerreotype work. Within the address, Draper expounded upon the proliferation of photographers in “any town of note,” and interestingly asserted the opportunities the new art-form afforded women:
It is by no means the least gratifying part of this result, that it [the photography profession] has furnished a suitable employment for many females. In the existing state of our social system, there are few things more worthy of the attention of good men than that interesting class of the other sex, who are thrown upon their own exertions for support…Are there not thousands whom nature has gifted with the acutest sensibilities, who are constrained by the tyranny of Society, to choose between a servile dependence or inadequately compensated labor…1
Though nursing and school teaching typify traditional 19th century women’s occupation, photography also represented an acceptable profession for Victorian era women, though men normally ran portrait studios before 1890. In 1850, the 71 daguerreotype studios in New York included 127 operators, as well as 11 women among the ranks. A November edition of Humphrey’s Journal estimated that men in the profession earned $10 per week, while women earned $5. Catherine Weed Barnes, an amateur photographer working in New York in the later 19th century and a pioneer of women in the profession, wrote articles including “Why Ladies Should be Admitted to Membership in Photographic Societies” (1889) and delivered the well received lectures, “Photography as a Profession for Women” and “Women as Photographers.” Furthermore, after 1870, career guides for women specifically mentioned photography as an employment opportunity.2
Before my research at the NYU Archives brought me to Draper’s address, I assumed the profession only constituted men, though I understood both sexes sat before the camera. History must, therefore, acknowledge women’s significant contributions to photography, not only after the Progressive Era altered women’s role in society, but at a time when passivity and domestic responsibility characterized feminine pursuits – at a time of photography’s nascence.
1. An Address to the Alumni of the University of the City of New York by J. W. Draper, June 28, 1853
2. Peter E. Palmquist, Preface of The Women in Photography International Archive,
I always assumed that women would have been discouraged from taking up photography. I figured that it would have been seen as unseemly for women to be the ones doing the gazing. But I suppose that if women were working in the confined space of the portrait studio, it might have been seen as more decorous. Alice Austen, a photographer of New York City street scenes beginning in the 1880s, operated outside of that paradigm. I wonder what people thought about a single women toting around heavy equipment and taking pictures of strangers– specifically lower class strangers.