Women's Studies Group 1558 – 1837 is pleased to announce an extraordinary summer seminar, exploring the relationship between history and the imagination, creativity and research. Sara Read: The Gossips’ Choice: Drawing on the Case Notes of Midwife Sarah Stone in Historical Fiction / Kim Sherwood: Creative Writing Research and the Eighteenth Century / Caroline Douglas: Spectre of a Woman

Spectre of a Woman

The history of photography has long been crafted in such a way that many of the living, breathing participants of its earliest period are written out. Principal among them are women. We are only now coming to terms with how photography was gendered from its very inception. Photography’s close association with the female body has been accompanied by the historical erasure of the agency of actual women: their hands, their thinking and self-activity that helped shape the medium through its fin de siècle phase.

This paper, entitled Spectre of a Woman, explores the history of women in early photographic practice through the case study of the C18th pioneering Chemist Elizabeth Fulhame and the C19th voiceless subject Elizabeth Johnstone Hall - a ‘Fishwife’ and one of the world’s first photographic subjects to be presented as art. Spectre of a Woman will be a presentation of my latest practice-led research, using re-enactment and montage as a method to explore the ethics and possibilities of recovering some of early photography’s ‘unknown women’.