Going Straight. Camera Work as Men's Work in the Gendering of American Photography, 1900-1923.

Publication Description: No form of image making comes closer to biblical concepts of Genesis than photography. Largely determined by various separations and modulations of light and dark, the primal association of the camera's pictures become all the more pronounced when photography's self-consciousness and voyeurism, both inherent in the Fall, are kept in mind. Power and fear are often linked to the lens and to its image, tribal societies recognizing that boxed Cyclops as the Evil Eye. Links between photographic process/product and conventional concepts of masculinity and femininity, though abundantly manifest, are seldom fully acknowledged. This essay explores the sexual subtext underlying and defining the shift from one key turn-of-the-century photographic movement to a new trend -- with a novel term and taste -- evolving just after World War I. This shift would affect most twentieth-century photography until the 1980's.