Anonymous Women. By Patty Carroll.

Patty Carroll is a photographer based in Chicago, known for her "highly intense, saturated" colour photographs for decades. Her impressive project "Anonymous Women" is a series (heads, reconstructed, demise, draped) that addresses "women and their complicated relationships with domesticity". Carroll turns situations into hide-and-seek between the viewer and the Anonymous Woman by camouflaging the latter (via).

Series "Heads":
"This intial series of Anonymous Women began when husband and I moved to London for a few years, and I was having a very hard time adjusting to British society. As a photographer and educator I use my maiden name, but in England no one knew me professionally and I was addressed as Mrs. Jones. It made me acutely aware that in more traditional societies, most women are still seen through the lens of their domestic status. It was a situation that led to a small identity crisis. My response was to begin a series of photographs depicting a female model whose identity was hidden behind various domestic objects. These were ‘unportraits’ – about being unseen. This anonymous woman represented the situation in which very many women find themselves." Patty Carroll

Series "Demise":

"I construct narrative, still-life photographs that are imagined interior rooms engulfing the lone figure of a woman. Home is a metaphor for the internal life of women; their worries, desires and interior dialogue. The “stage”sets are full size, using household furniture and objects that combine reality with fictional possibilities. As we have been confined to our homes during the pandemic, the overwhelming experience of being “at home” has new meaning and importance for almost everyone. Home is not only a place for comfort and safety, but the central locus of work and play, and where psychodramas of life are experienced." Patty Carroll

Series "Draped": link

Series "Reconstructed": link

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photographs by Patty Carroll via and via and via and via and via 

Eve Arnold (III): No Woman in Inverted Commas

"I was green and awed by the male founder members. I hated the 'there-there little girl' pat on the head attitude of a few of my colleagues." When, a great many years later, she was asked what it had been like to be a woman in a man's world, she replied: "It's man in a woman's world!" In fact, she felt that being a woman was an advantage, "a marvelous plus to photographing".

At the time she arrived, photo-journalism was dominated by men. She helped opening the door for women and beacme "a role model for the legion of women phtographers who came after her" (de Giovanni, 2015)-

Twenty-five years ago, when I became a photojournalist, I was looked on as someone apart—a “career lady,” a “woman photographer.” My colleagues were not spoken of in inverted commas; they were not “career men” or “men photographers”. I was not happy about it, but realized as have women before me that it was a fundamental part of female survival to play the assigned role. I could not fight against those attitudes. I needed to know more about other women to try to understand what made me acquiesce in this situation.

It was then that I started my project, photographing and talking to women. I became both observer and participant. I photographed girl children and women; the rich and the poor; the migratory potato picker on Long Island and the Queen of England; the nomad bride in the Hindu Kush waiting for a husband she had never seen, and the Hollywood Queen Bee whose life was devoted to a regimen of beauty care. There were the Zulu woman whose child was dying of hunger and women mourning their dead in Hoboken, New Jersey. I filmed in harems in Abu Dhabi, in bars in Cuba, and in the Vatican in Rome. There was birth in London and betrothal in the Caucasus, divorce in Moscow and protest marches of black women in Virginia. There were the known and the unknown—and always those marvelous faces.

I am not a radical feminist, because I don’t believe that siege mentality works. But I know something of the problems and the inequities of being a woman, and over the years the women I photographed talked to me about themselves and their lives. Each had her own story to tell- uniquely female but also uniquely human.

Themes recur again and again in my work. I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women.

I realize now that through my work these past twenty-five years I have been searching for myself, my time, and the world I live in. Eve Arnold

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- de Giovanni, J. (2015). Eve Arnold. Magnum Legacy. Prestel.
- photograph (Havana, 1954) via

Eve Arnold (I): Passion for Social Justice

Eve Arnold (1912-2012) was born in Philadelphia into a poor family of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. In 1943, she married Arnold Arnold, a Jewish refugee from Hitler Germany.

"Although Eve was never overtly political, her passion for social justice and her curiosity about people's lives made her a perfect witness to the emerging currents and trends of the time."

Eve Arnold photographed the Davis family, descendants of early settlers and US-American prototypes, at meetings, having a church supper, ... and after a while suggested that she also photograph the migrants working for them in their fields picking strwaberries, sorting potatoes, living in overcrowded camps without toilet facilities and water. The living conditions  shocked Arnold, her photographs were called "another step in Eve's development as a photojournalist with a deep social conscience". She was ready to tackle social injustice, "not a popular subject then". 

"As a second-generation American, daughter of Russian immigrants, growing up during the Depression, the reality I knew well was poverty and deprivation. So I could identify easily with laborers who followed the potato crop north along the Eastern seaboard, settling in each new area as the harvest was ready for them." Eve Arnold

Once, Arnold came up with the controversial idea to photograph hearings at the House Un-American Activities Committee. "As the daughter of parents who had escaped the horrors of the Russian pogroms, she felt deeply for anyone who suffered for their religious of political beliefs". In order to understand the situation better, she researched and found people who had suffered at McCarthy's hand and were still living in fear. When she went to Washington, she was the only woman reporter, McCarthy singled her out, went to her, rested his hand on her shoulder. Reporters were watching her, other journalists thought McCarthy had befriended her, hence ignored her.

Aged 70, she travelled across her homeland where she found the social and political climate troubling: homelessness, HIV epidemic, mortgage foreclosures... She decided not to take black-and-white photographs since she was afraid they would make the images too bleak. At the beginning of the journey she visited the Navajo Nation, then continued photographing miners, strippers, construction workers, prisoners, church choirs, immigrants, queer transvestite nuns, and the Ku Klux Klan ... the last one she called her worst experience (de Giovanni, 2015).

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- de Giovanni, J. (2015). Eve Arnold. Magnum Legacy. Prestel.
- photograph via 

Margaret Bourke-White. Woman of Firsts.

"Margaret Bourke-White was a woman of firsts. The first woman to clamber over rivers of molten iron in the foundry and to face the heat of the furnaces in order to produce unusual, visionary industrial photographs. The first woman to tackle aerial photography ("if you find yourself eight hundred feet up, pretend it's only three, relax and get on calmly with your work", was her motto). The first woman to create a book with photos and essays on the Depression in the southern USA during the 1930s. The first woman to document Russia during the five-year plan and the only one to obtain a portrait session with Stalin. The first for whom the uniform of war correspondent was designed. And the first to record the horror of Buchenwald concentration camp, to document India at the moments of its separation from Pakistan and the only woman to capture an intense portrait of Mahatma Gandhi a few hours before his death...



...The first to go underground with miners in South Africa, to photograph in colour racial segregation in America. The first, above all, not to hide from the camera, becoming in her turn the subject of a reportage documenting, under the powerful and tender gaze of her colleague Alfred Eisenstaedt, her battle with Parkinson's disease, which would leave her immobile and lead to her death. In those moments, Margaret, who was renowned for her elegance and innate dress sense, was not afraid to show herself, old and frightened, in all her vulnerability."



"This was the first I heard the words I was to hear repeated thousands of times: "We didn’t know. We didn’t know." But they did know. I saw and photographed the piles of naked, lifeless bodies, the human skeletons in furnaces, the living skeletons who would die the next day because they had had to wait too long for deliverance. Buchenwald was more than the mind could grasp. People often ask me how it is possible to photograph such atrocities. I have to work with a veil over my mind. In photographing the murder camps, the protective veil was so tightly drawn that I hardly knew what I had taken until I saw prints of my own photographs. It was as though I was seeing these horrors for the first time."

"Mine is a life into which marriage doesn’t fit very well. If I had had children, I would have drawn creative inspiration from them, and shaped my work to them. Perhaps I would have worked on a children’s book, rather than going to wars. One life is not better than the other; it is just a different life."




text from, photographs taken (by MLM) at exhibition "Margaret Bourke-White. Prima, Donna.", Milan, Palazzo Reale.

The first female ...

Linda McCartney (for her current exhibition in Vienna see) certainly was a gifted photographer - it was her way of seeing and portraying music stars that made her famous. And her picture of Eric Clapton turned her into the first female photographer whose artwork was published on the cover of the Rolling Stone.

The Beatles and a wonderful excerpt from their movie Help! (via YouTube)... Enjoy!