Indecent Exposures: Shifts in Feminist Photography 1970-90

"Indecent Exposures" assembles a history of feminist photography. The photographers discussed here have helped define cultural value, knowledge and power. For the past two decades, their images have invented alternative stories about "a woman's life". Women's photographic rites of passage have forced an about-face for the avant-garde, the politicization of the social and the de-stabilization of sexual identity. Three themes - the subject, the social, the sexual - are addressed as key points of resistance. In these fields, feminist interventions have been dramatically yet unevenly reformulated. Catriona Moore has herself contributed to this history as an art critic, activist, historian and lecturer. Her partisan yet critical evaluation of the past 20 years comes at a turning point in feminist work. While more women artists are entering the mainstream than ever before, the terms and conditions of their very success has relegated a wealth of other projects and images to the "too hard" basket. Moore sifts through more than two decades of feminist image-making. As often happens with women's work, many of these projects have now been lost or dispersed among forgotten negative files, garage storage or in the basements of our public museums. The public scrutiny of more private or instrumental ephemeral and temporal projects, in addition to widely-recognized exhibition work, opens a Pandora's box of images. Yet recovering twenty years of feminist photographic history is in itself not enough. Through an innovative reading of photographic documents, Moore weaves convincing and productive arguments about aesthetic and political effectiveness. What photographic projects have worked best? What aims and strategies have we discarded along the way? This unique dossier on feminist art in Australia documents the past in the present tense, and with an eye to future possibilities. Speculations locates feminist photographs as technologies of self-transformation as well as strategic interventions within arenas as diverse as art history and industrial relations. Dr Catriona Moore is an art historian and critic, and co-ordinator of Theoretical Studies in the School of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Western Sydney.