Just the other day when I finished reading Vladimir Nobokov’s Lolita, I somehow felt immensely proud of Lolita, the protagonist. She, being a woman, better to say a female (and rather a proud one), dared enough to twist and mold the fate of a man, who was not only twice her age but also doubled her in his experience of life and in his maturity.

I surely cannot define the exact nature of my emotion toward Lolita, or why I felt so strongly about a girl and how she molded a man’s fate, but perhaps the seed lies in my own experience of growing up in a family where there was only two daughters. And by two daughters, I particularly mean, “No Sons.” Never in our lives we were made to feel undesirable by our parents, but whenever anyone enquired about my family, and I answered that we were two sisters only, I was immediately faced with the most hated question of “no brother at all?” This had always made me squirm with anger and frustration, and I had always wanted to answer back saying. “No, we don’t have one, do you have a problem?”

May be it is my inability, or maybe it is my upbringing, but I had always failed to understand what great deed a son can do for the society and for his parents that a daughter cannot. I also could not fathom why a child has to be demarcated as a girl child and a boy child, and not loved unconditionally. Recently,  I was shocked to hear that the quest for a male child is so much that even a woman in her 70s had put her health on stake and taken the help of artificial reproductive technology to have a male “heir,” despite having two grown up daughters!

A random check on how undesirable a girl child is can be very heart breaking. In India, the ridiculous desperation and the terrible yearning for a male child is reaching the level of abnormality. Foeticides and infanticides are well known, and the victims are always girls. Amidst all modernization and globalization, till today in the villages of India, and even in big cities sometimes, while the male child of the family is welcomed with the sound of conch shells and much rejoicing, their female counterparts are looked down with sympathy and sometimes even disgust and frustration.

 The roots of this age-old fondness for males over females in the family line is driven by a mixture of ethnic, social, religious, as well as economic conditions. Though the actual scenario has changed considerably in the present days, still the society expects sons to look after the parents in their old age. They are the ones who would take the family name forward and bring prosperity to the household. Daughters though referred to as the Laxmi of the house, is considered to be the one that will drain out the wealth and property by means of dowry.  A girl child is to brought up to be given away to another family to help carry on their family line, she is to be denied her ancestral property, and she is even to be denied her right of performing the last rites of her parents.

Is it worth being a girl even now in India?

Like most other professional fields where women were initially discouraged, the world of photography was also considered a male bastion as women were thought to be too delicate to carry the heavy photography equipment or work with the chemicals required for developing photographs.  Yet, women have invaded this male stronghold, and continue to do so with equal finesse and ease.  Notable women photographers have been taking various kinds of photographs, from portraits to landscapes, from war to day-to-day events; some of whom have been honoured to some who have quietly left behind nothing but the photographs they took.  This is indeed a tribute to the women in photography.

The early 20th century produced many notable women photographers.  Berenice Abbot started her career in photography as Man Ray’s darkroom assistant, knowing nothing about photography.  Her photographs of New York City in the 1930’s are an excellent depiction of urban life:  the diverse people, the places they work, live and play, and their daily activities.  Abbot also tried to sell her inventions like a distortion easel, telescopic lighting pole, known today as the autopole, and other aids in the “House of Photography”.
 
Diane Arbus, was known for “photographing freaks” because she often portrayed the absurdity with a sense of fatalism.  Elizabeth Alice Austen produced more than 8000 photographs in 40 years, but her photographs became famous a mere two years before she died.  By 1950, then aged 63, she had had to move into the Staten Island’s poorhouse. However, when her glass plate negatives were looked at, many were published in the book Revolt of Women, and her share of the proceeds were enough to move her into a private nursing home where she died in 1952.

The Depression and the two World Wars also brought many women photographers into the forefront.  Dorothea Lange, one of the first woman commercial photographers, was best known for her photographs of the Depression.  Her photographs depict the breadlines, the waterfront strikes, and the sheer desperation of the people.  She also captured images of the Japanese-American relocation camps, which were so critical of the Japanese-American policies that the Army confiscated them.  After the war, Lange co-founded the magazine Aperture.

Margaret Bourke-White was the world’s first woman war correspondent, photographing in the combat zones of Germany, Africa and Italy during WWII.  She was the only American photographer in Russia during the battle of Moscow, and she photographed Mahatma Gandhi a few hours before he was assassinated.  Annie Leibowitz, one the world’s leading entertainment photographers, has been published in Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair.  She was the last person to professionally photograph John Lennon.  Anne Geddes is famous for her photographs of infants with flora and fauna.  There are numerous more notable women photographers, but it is impossible to note them all.

How are women photographers different?  Why do we need to look at photographs through the lens of gender?  Because women have a different outlook to life, which they imprint on the photographs.