Made or Taken? Photographs of Women, 1840-1980

Exhibition

Exhibition Overview

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Made or Taken? Photographs of Women, 1840-1980
North Balcony, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas

Beginning with the daguerreotype portrait of Dorothy Catherine Draper – the first woman in the world to sit before a camera – this exhibition from the Spencer's collection presents photographs of women both famous and anonymous by photographers such as A.J. Russell, Nadar, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Dian Arbus, and Helmut Newton. These works test some of our basic assumptions about the nature of photography. Are photographs pure documents, simply "taken" from the world by the photographer? or are they products of the photographer's own ideas, "made" from his or her imagination just like any other work of art? This exhibition was organized by students in a graduate seminar in the history of photography.

Works of art

Clarence John Laughlin
1955
Reed Estabrook
1979
Linda Connor
1979
Dean Brown
1968
George Platt Lynes
1935
Emmet Gowin
1971
Imogen Cunningham
1958
Lewis Wickes Hine
1909
Orval Hixon
1919
Édouard Boubat
1980
NYC
Robert Frank
1948
Arthur Rothstein
1947
August Sander
1928
Nadar
circa 1863
Gertrude Stanton Käsebier
circa 1908
Gertrude Stanton Käsebier
circa 1900
Edward Weston
circa 1923
Bud Lee
1969
Edward Steichen
1913
George Henry Seeley
1907
Paul Strand
1917
Oscar Gustav Rejlander
circa 1863
Marion Palfi
1949
Édouard Boubat
1948
Marion Palfi
1949
Dr. John W. Draper
1840