Ariel Evans

This project historicizes the interrelated artistic and activist projects conducted at the turn of the 1980s by socialist-feminist artist Martha Rosler, lesbian-feminist artist Tee A. Corinne, and Black feminist artist Carrie Mae Weems. Offering close reads of how Rosler’s, Corinne’s, and Weems’s works use photography to represent female and feminist subjectivities, I use archival evidence to reconstruct how these artists distributed, exhibited, and discussed their photographic projects in feminist collectives as well as photography’s institutional fora.

I argue that feminist photographies hold an understudied but transformational presence in the U.S.-American art world’s turn to photography during the 1980s. Art historians have often located this turn in theories of authorship, differentiating between a modernist dedication to the photographer’s subjective expression in fine-art photography, versus a postmodernist refusal of the artist’s subjectivity in Conceptual art. I argue that this epistemological binary is rooted in whiteness and maleness; as I show, women frequently traveled between the fine-art photography and Conceptual art worlds. I analyze how Rosler, Corinne, and Weems produced and distributed photographic images to express alternative forms of authorship in which photographers share agency over images with their human subjects and audiences. Examining how Rosler’s, Corinne’s, and Weems’s theories of authorship conversed with those of fine-art photography and Conceptual art, I ground the history of art and photography in the politics of creating socially-just institutions in which women, in all our diversity, participate equitably.