Marky Kauffmann
The Dressings Project
The passage of the 19th amendment granting American women the right to vote was a struggle that lasted for more than eighty years. Why? Why did American men deny American women the right to vote for so many years after the ratification of the American constitution which gave them that very same right?
In considering the struggle to ratify the 19th amendment, I wanted to examine, through my images, the idea of gender. What does it mean to be female? How do you identify a female? In Michelle Tolini Finamore’s essay, “A Curator’s Perspective” for the exhibit, Gender Bending Fashion, at the Boston MFA, she states that clothing “serves as a primary means of non-verbal communication signifying identity” and that the “traditional division between menswear and womenswear reflects a history in which institutions across society - not only fashion, but education, religion, medicine, the legal system and beyond – have sought to describe gender as a strict binary, established on notions of biological difference.”
Traditionally, donning the dress identified us as female, certainly in the years between 1840 (the beginning of the suffrage movement) and 1920. When men gazed upon us wearing dresses - on the streets, in places of worship, at home, etc. they had a certain notion of who we were i.e. members of the weaker sex.
I want to take back the dress, in the same way that feminists in the 1970’s took back the night. I want to reclaim it. My dresses have become symbols for all that I love about identifying as female. They are elegant, bold, funny, sexy, wild and creative!
With these dresses, I celebrate the power and possibilities of the franchise. Voting is the first step towards self-determination, creating a world in which women can do and be and wear whatever we want!
Marky Kauffmann has been working as a fine art photographer, educator, and curator for more than thirty years. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2017 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist’s Fellowship in Photography. Recently, she won First Place in Soho Photo Gallery’s National Alternative Processes Competition, and was a finalist in the 7th Edition Julia Margaret Cameron Worldwide Gala Awards in three categories, including portraiture, landscape, and fine art photography.
Kauffmann has been a freelance curator for many years. Her first curatorial endeavor, Beyond Mothers and Children: New Feminist Photographers, featured the images of six women photographers working on issues surrounding the lives of women and girls. In 2015, she helped curate Veiled Rebellion, an exhibit featuring the work of Pulitzer Prize winning photographer, Lynsey Addario, at Milton Academy’s Nesto Gallery. Kauffmann’s exhibit, Outspoken: Seven Women Photographers has traveled extensively throughout New England.
Kauffmann is a passionate educator who has taught photography at numerous secondary schools in the Boston area. She also spent twenty years teaching adults in the New England School of Photography’s Workshop Program.
Kauffmann is in love with photography. She utilizes darkroom techniques, alternative processes, and digital technologies to create her unique images.
instagram: @marky.ek
