Jordanna Kalman

In order to make images I need to feel emotionally invested. While I’m all for women’s rights I found I wasn’t inspired to make images specifically about the 19th amendment. I realized it’s because I’ve always had the right to vote and never felt the frustration of that particular inequality.

This led me to think about when I have felt slighted and it took me maybe one millisecond to come up with ‘being a woman photographer.’

Just that in itself, that I’m labeled a ‘woman’ photographer and not just ‘photographer’ annoys me to no end.

Men have controlled the whole history of art for all of time. In my formal education in photography, 99.9% of the work I was introduced to was made by male photographers. When we’re taught by example, that this is the IMPORTANT AND CORRECT work to emulate; a male point of view, where does that leave me? How can I honestly express myself as a woman when most of what I’ve seen/learned from is what men have made? If I’m ever able to unlearn the rules of male photography, truly express myself as a woman, (and I do NOT mean the ‘female gaze,’ a demeaning, condescending, pigeon-holing term) would that work be rejected as wrong? The parallel drawn between my distress here and a woman’s right to vote is the idea of needing permission from men. As men control the world, we are left to gain license from them; they allowed us the right to vote, to be educated, to have jobs, to be deemed worthy enough to be included in the art world (a small percentage anyway).

In the pieces I’ve made for the Yellow Rose project, my photographs are seen through a window cut into photographs made by some of my favorite “master photographers.” I wonder if my work may always be trapped by my formal education, and also considered less than or unimportant because it wasn’t made with an 8x10 or an American poet’s (male of course) prose as inspiration or of new topographics (which are like, so old by now) or uninteresting because the nudity isn’t sexual and therefore useless to the male gaze or irrelevant because I’m over 35 and I have children. With all the inequalities and biases women endure... what good are women’s rights if all the rules continue to be put in place by old white men?