Paul Mellon Centre’s Doctoral Researchers Network Summer Symposium in collaboration with their sister network, Early Career Researchers in British Art. Organized by: Katherine Gazzard and Rosie Ram, Paul Mellon Doctoral Researchers Network.

This paper 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’. In doing so, it interrogates her experience of being photographed into 'the canon'.