Women’s representation and the female gaze

25 Apr 2024 1-2pm

Overview

Held to coincide with the upcoming exhibition Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In, hear from Professor Patrizia Di Bello in a lecture that explores the representation of women working in photography throughout history and contemporary arts.

The lecture will address how women have often been positioned in relation to their bodies and appearance, in a way male artists and creatives seldom are. 

Join academic, Patrizia Di Bello as they explore photography through the female gaze and aims to redefine what it means to be a woman working in the arts today.

Patrizia Di Bello is editor-in-chief of History of Photography, and Professor of History and Theory of Photography at Birkbeck, University of London, where she co-directs the History and Theory of Photography Research Centre and looks after the Jo Spence Memorial Library Archive. She has written on different aspects of women’s engagement with photography as practitioners, collectors and writers, from Julia Margaret Cameron to Ana Mendieta and Jo Spence. Her publications Sculptural Photographs from The Calotype to Digital Technologies (Bloomsbury 2017), The Photobook from Talbot to Ruscha (IB Tauris, 2012), edited with Colette Wilson and Shamoon Zamir, and Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian Britain: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts (Ashgate 2007). She is currently working on a critical anthology of Jo Spence’s writings on photography.