Giving Them Proper Exposure

SANTA BARBARA — The spellbinding “Head of a Young Woman” photographed by German artist Anneliese Kretschmer around 1930 shows a face pressed close to the picture’s surface, its enigmatic mystery perversely heightened by the sheer insistence of its tight-in intimacy. So close are we to the subject and so velvety dark are its dominant blacks that it’s hard even to make out the lower half of the picture, beneath the woman’s face; there, she appears to clutch to her breast a garment with a trim of white fur--a little pillow of radiant fuzziness on which her grimly determined head seems to rest.

The photograph, in its portrayal of a beautiful face radiating light from out of pitch-black darkness, is perhaps stylistically informed by the sharply contrasted look and mannerisms of contemporary silent movies. The rims beneath her shadowed eyes are stark white crescents, accentuating the breathless stare--hers and, upon reflection, ours. The experience edges toward melodrama.

In 1928 Kretschmer had photographed a street scene that couldn’t be more different in subject from “Head of a Young Woman.” Still, it too shines with an unmistakable intimacy.

The location is Paris, outside the unassuming Hotel de la Havana. The angle of soft light and near absence of people on the street suggest the time is early morning.

The photograph is split in half, literally down the middle, by the sharp vertical edge of a shop window on the right, against which the artist must have stood. The darkened window glass creates an indecipherable maze of transparency and reflection, while the left half of the picture, opening onto the narrow street, is a crisp mosaic of exuberant urban signs, shapes and disappearing pathways out of the tangle of interior claustrophobia implied on the right.

Kretschmer, in both the portrait and the urban landscape, uses her camera to make you feel that, by privileged extension, you are the only person present before her subject. A contrary sense of estrangement looms, manufactured from a photographically induced intimacy.

Kretschmer (1903-1987) is an artist new to me, as she probably also is to most visitors to “A History of Women Photographers,” the exhibition that opened recently at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (it remains through Aug. 17). Not entirely unknown--the two pictures were after all loaned to the traveling show from a German museum collection--neither is Kretschmer’s a name you will find in standard photography reference books.

Perhaps there’s good reason. Two compelling pictures are not enough on which to gauge a career that spanned half a century; maybe the exhibition’s able curators, Naomi Rosenblum and Barbara Tannenbaum, have been unusually adroit in choosing the only Kretschmer pictures worth looking at.

The point is that, together, “Head of a Young Woman” and “Hotel Havana, Paris” make you want to see more of this little-known but apparently gifted artist’s photographs. And in this very big, even sprawling survey, which means to call attention to the particular contributions made by women to the art of photography since the mid-19th century, that happy experience recurs quite often.

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The exhibition makes its case through the sheer force of volume: Some 200 works line the gallery walls, while half a dozen vitrines display books, magazines, albums, daguerreotypes, stereographic prints and other photographs. In sum, more than 200 photographers are represented, most by a single work.

Arrival in the exhibition’s handsome galleries can even be a bit daunting, as room after room stretches out before you. (Incidentally, the show is also being celebrated by 13 other art spaces around town, including the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum on nearby Paseo Nuevo; they’ve independently organized adjunct exhibitions relating to women photographers.) The point may not be surprising but it is inescapable: Women--and lots of them--have made great photographs throughout the medium’s history.

The show is based on Rosenblum’s critically well-received 1994 book of the same name, although the pictures on the walls are not necessarily the same as those in the book. (There is no catalog.) While a few non-Western artists are included, such as China’s Yang Ling (represented by a straightforward 1949 documentary image descriptively titled “Villagers Welcome the People’s Liberation Army”), attention is almost exclusively focused on those who have been based in Europe and the Americas.

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The exhibition also boasts its share of iconic images. Dorothea Lange’s magnificent “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California” (1936) is easily the most famous. This indelible picture of three children in tatters huddled around their abject mother creates a kind of working-class American Madonna of the Great Depression, whose labor-weary central figure seems far older than her 32 years.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s leonine portrait of scientist Sir J.F.W. Herschel (1867) looking like an Old Testament prophet as imagined by Rembrandt, Imogen Cunningham’s crisply erotic still life of the interior of a single iris blossom (1926) and Laura Gilpin’s otherworldly landscape vista of the rocky spires of Utah’s Bryce Canyon (1930) are among the many celebrated images on view.

Not chronological, the show has instead been divided into eight thematic categories: narrative and allegory; landscape and the urban scene; nudes; still lifes; portraits; documentary; fashion, advertising and theatrical; and experimental photographs. While the categories aren’t exclusive--Lange’s “Migrant Mother” is one obvious mix, blending narrative, portrait and documentary--the thematic emphasis shows women working in virtually every corner of the photographic field.

It also deftly undercuts any notion of a linear, separate-but-equal history for women photographers. Rather, women’s changing social circumstances in relation to photographic practice during the last 150 years come to the foreground.

Nineteenth century realities of class gave some women--Cameron, say, and Lady Clementina Hawarden--the advantage of leisure, which allowed their experimentation with the newfangled medium of photography. If few urban images exist from before World War I, the absence may reflect the social constraints that made it improper (not to mention unsafe) for an unaccompanied woman to explore city streets. Sometimes, as in the 1950s photojournalist work of Grace Robertson, we see domestic stories of women, by women, to which no man would likely have access. The abundance of portraiture may suggest a social bias--one that perceives women as more emotionally responsive than men, and thus more suited to the demands of the genre.

Portraiture also provided one accessible means for women to earn a living making photographs. By the time Dorothea Lange closed her successful portrait studio in San Francisco to photograph displaced refugees of the horrific Dust Bowl, she faced problems specific to women with families--from established economic limitations to issues of child care--that gave her a degree of ready understanding of the plight of the workers who became her subjects.

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In selecting artists for the show, the curators understandably had to choose an arbitrary cutoff date, given the proliferation of women making photographs today. With a few exceptions, the photographers on view were born before 1950.

Cindy Sherman is among the exceptions--she was born in 1954--and it’s easy to see why. Her inclusion illuminates a fundamental historical difference between photographers now and photographers at the time of the medium’s invention.

The new invention of photography was initially seen to be more technological novelty than art. Because it had no established tradition, with all the exclusionary trappings of training and apprenticeship that kept women from becoming painters and sculptors, women were drawn to the medium from the start. Large numbers were again drawn to camera work (including video) in the wake of the contemporary feminist movement, and for similar reasons.

Here’s the difference: Women of Julia Margaret Cameron’s generation had little choice, and they made the best of their limited option; women of Sherman’s generation made the choice with their eyes open, fully aware that the social limitations could be powerfully harnessed as subject matter.

More than any other’s, Sherman’s fictionalized portraits of herself as everything from Hollywood glamour queen and neighborhood tomboy to fairy-tale monster and goofy schoolgirl (the swell picture here) crystallized a moment: The established second-class status of photography as an art form met the traditional second-class status of women in patriarchal society, all within a new awareness of the gathering critical mass of a media-saturated environment.

Given Sherman’s specific achievement, as well as the central role she and other women played since 1980 in moving photographic art to center stage, it’s good to finally have “A History of Women Photographers.” And note that this show and book are specifically billed as a history, not the history; a lot of territory remains for exploration.

To be sure, any number of dull and pedestrian photographs can be seen in the show, such as Christine B. Fletcher’s homely still life of carefully posed grapes tumbling from a hand-woven basket (circa 1938). This is the sort of amateur-hour photography that sweats bullets in its conservative desperation to be considered art--just like a painting!--an attitude that killed off Pictorialism as a lively genre decades before.

But, for every one of those tedious hobby shots, at least one Anneliese Kretschmer or Belle Johnson will generate a double-take. (Don’t miss the Missouri-born Johnson’s fascinating--and vaguely creepy--figure study, which pictures a row of three turn-of-the-century women showing off their long hair, unfurled and cascading to the floor.) Photographs like these only leave you wanting to see more.

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“A HISTORY OF WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St. Dates: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Closed Mondays. Ends Aug. 17. Prices: Adults, $4; senior citizens, $3; students and children 6-17, $1.50; under age 6, free. Phone: (805) 963-4364.