‘Women, Work and Commerce in the Creative Industries, Britain 1750 – 1950’ is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and organised by Collaborative Doctoral Partnership students Erika Lederman (De Montfort University/V&A) Hannah Lyons (Birkbeck, University of London/ V&A) and George Mind (University of Westminster/National Portrait Gallery).

Hill's Newhaven fishwife…has something that cannot be silenced, something that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there.
Walter Benjamin, 1931

David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson’s calotype portrait of Elizabeth (Johnstone) Hall is a foundational work of photography, and it is also one of the first to have been self-consciously presented as art (Stevenson, 1981:23). Nine decades after Benjamin’s declaration to know the woman who was alive there, Johnstone Hall remains largely unknown to us. This ought to come as no surprise: 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 explores the history of women in early photographic practice in Victorian Scotland through the case study of the voiceless subject Elizabeth Johnstone Hall - one of Hill and Adamson’s Newhaven ‘Fishwives’. The paper takes the form of a dialogue between archive and image; empirical research and studio practice. It explores the ethics and possibilities of recovering one of photography’s ‘unknown women’, and interrogates her experience of being photographed into the 'canon'.