Girls' Club

Re-Framing the Feminine demonstrates the varied strategies employed by female photographers to frame their experiences using the technology of film photography and digital media.

Curated by Dina Mitrani, Miami-based photography curator and gallerist, Re-Framing the Feminine's aim is to demonstrate what is particularly female in the capture and/or construction of a photographic image. The fluidity women experience as both subjects and objects in the photographic field is significant.

A catalog with an essay by writer and lecturer Vicki Goldberg will accompany this exhibition which defines women as dynamic image makers using a medium in relentless flux.

Re-Framing the Feminine assembles forty-seven works from the 1950s to the present from the collection of Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz. It is an anthology of photographic images made by women during an era when their own lives were undergoing dramatic changes. As femininity itself got a makeover, especially in the turbulent decades of the 70s and 80s, photography too underwent a technological overhaul. The cramped kitchen/lab of the darkroom, with its chemicals, silver and gelatin, paper stocks and enlargers gave way to the sleek glass monitor, the click and download, pixels and file resolution of the digital era. Apparently, both photography and women’s lives are still in flux.

 Any generalization about the way women approach photography would not hold true. Women do not globally process things in the same way. However, the works in Re-Framing the Feminine are distinguished by a deliberate subjectivity as opposed to a detached formality. A special aptitude or empathy for the social conditions of women’s lives is present. Home-making, child-rearing, and self-objectification are all present. The banalities of everyday life are meticulously probed, and from these are extracted eccentric wisps of color, form, symbolic poses, reflections, and myriad stories. Childhood (how many male artists concern themselves with children as subjects?) and all phases of human development are revealed with compassion.