Another betrayal

By Kerstin Rodgers, photographer

Lee Miller

Since the invention of photography in the 1830s, there have always been women photographers. Think of early pioneers such as Julia Margaret Cameron, documentarists such as Dorothea Lange, war photographers like Lee Miller, fine art photographers such as Diane Arbus, portraitists like Jane Bown, photojournalists such as Mary Ellen Mark, and more recently the celebrity photographer Annie Liebovitz.

Despite this, when it comes to getting work, getting published and making a living, women photographers have always been at a disadvantage. My own 40-year experience as a photographer taught me that women tend to get the tiny £150 portrait jobs, or the covering of ‘women’s issues’ such as childbirth or childcare, while men get the sexy jobs: doing the cover, the expensive on-location fashion shoots, the five-page-spreads of important issues such as war and crisis. And honestly very little has changed.

This table shows that, with the Guardian, for instance, only 8% of their leading photographs were taken by women. Women are 70 to 80 per cent of photography students, but dwindle to only 13 to 15% of professionals. So it’s a pity that the same organisation that produced the table above, Women Photograph, a non-profit set up four years ago to promote the work of women, has decided that their mission isn’t just to promote women alone. They’ve devoted at least 20 % of their grants to trans-identified males. They say: *We believe that gender is a spectrum. Women Photograph is inclusive of a plurality of femme voices including trans, queer and non-binary people.

Women, that is to say, natal women, struggle to have confidence in themselves as photographers when they don’t get work. The above quote mentions ‘Femme voices’- the attempts of trans women to pitch their voices to sound more womanly. But women’s higher pitched and therefore less resonant voices are precisely one of the reasons they are taken less seriously. Why would you seek what is in fact a disadvantage especially in a career traditionally associated with men? I know male photographers who transitioned late in life to become women. For decades they benefited from male privilege, earning more than their women peers, getting more work than those peers, and generally having a higher profile in their career. Now they benefit from transprivilege.

Women Photograph give five grants a year to women photographers, and say they will give at a minimum one of these grants, that is 20% to trans-identified males or ‘non binary’ women (whatever that means this week). Twenty per cent is a proportion vastly in excess of the actual percentage of trans women in society. This category doesn’t even include LBG people, only trans. It would be more understandable if they gave 1 of the 5 grants to women of colour, who are extremely underrepresented as a proportion of the population in the photography world as are all black photographers.

Trans can now mean anything from ‘I feel like wearing some makeup today’ to, much, much more rarely, full surgical and hormonal transition. Do they even include trans-identified females? At the same time ‘non-binary’ is so nebulous a concept that anyone can claim to be it. Despite the good work of Women Photograph in other areas, this partitioning off of scant funds to males, in a world already weighted in their favour, seems disproportionate and unfair.