Photographically illustrated books, scrapbooks, family albums and portfolios can be seen as “proto-forms” from which photobooks evolved from private to public. Like watercolor or embroidery, assembling scrapbooks and family albums was a traditional activity for women with “time on their hands” for domestic tasks deemed non-essential. Julia Margaret Cameron’s albums from the 1860s are prime examples of the way photobooks emerged from the private, single-copy album dedicated to a specific person. She assembled lavishly bound albums with handwritten captions for her sitters, friends and acquaintances, many of them eminent personalities from her privileged social circle.[1] Like Cameron, Doris Ulmann’s A Portrait Gallery of American Editors (1925) possesses a tactile quality characteristic of a family album and her pictorialist training was at Clarence White’s School of Photography, the first professional photography school to grant access to women. As a proponent of Pictorialism, Ulmann sought to demonstrate that photography should be considered fine art, and sequenced her book to be a “gallery” evocative of exclusive clubs where paintings of board members and founders graced the walls.

An assistant of Gertrude Käsebier and a fellow of Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession—which, like Pictorialism, promoted photography as a fine art medium—Alice Boughton was one of several New York women who ran their own studios starting in the 1880s. With Käsebier, Zaida Ben-Yusuf, Mary Devens, Emma Justine Farnsworth, Clara Sipprell, Eva Watson-Schütze and Mathilde Weil, Boughton was part of a group of prominent women photographers at the turn of the century. Art, politics and gender equality were woven into her work as a socialist and feminist active in the New Woman movement—a term popularized by Henry James, one of Boughton’s sitters. Reflecting their growing presence in the artistic community, eleven of the twenty-eight portraits represented in Boughton’s later book, Photographing the Famous (1928), are of women. Rejecting posed portraits in favor of captured movements, her photographs present models from outside her privileged social circle and explore extremes in tonality—shades of white on white or black on black.

Paris emerged in the 1920s as a center of avant-garde art and a refuge for many expatriates and exiled photographers from elsewhere in Europe and the United States. With the explosion of construction, industry and technical innovation, a Machine Age aesthetic flourished and was reflected in imagery in the fields of photography and advertising. A proponent of this artistic sensibility, Germaine Krull was strongly influenced by her friends Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s school of Orphic Cubism and its fascination with urban subjects and modern industry. Taking her cue from Russian avant-garde movements, Krull created Métal (1928), an unbound book with an angled, hand-lettered title inspired by constructivist works by Gustav Klucis and Petr Galadzhev. A shift from Pictorialism to Modernism, the folio’s loose, unpaginated structure and lack of captions invite the reader to arrange the images in any sequence. The result is a “book-space” that Russian artist El Lissitzky had presciently described as an entity that emerges when a reader and book interact.

An inventive rethinking of the book, as realized by Lissitzky and his Russian peers, paved the way for the birth of the modern photobook in the Soviet Union, where it found some of its most remarkable expressions. The confluence of photomontaged images in cinematic sequences with bold colors and dynamic typography became the hallmark of Soviet photobooks. Designer and artist Varvara Stepanova, known for her photomontages and collages, was fascinated with the book as a material object. In 1924, for the stage design of An Evening of the Book—a play that was part of a mass campaign to propagate universal literacy—she created a gigantic book from which heroes of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary volumes stepped out of the pages. Her contribution to Groznyi smekh. Okna Rosta (A Menacing Laughter: The ROSTA Windows, 1932), a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the ROSTA windows, is the endpapers illustrated with a photomontage from repeated and diagonally placed images of a Red Army soldier by Boris Ignatovich on a red background. The montage is accompanied by a quote from “Red Hedgehog,” a poem by the book’s author, Vladimir Mayakovsky.

The Soviet state publishing houses of the 1920s published brochures and books on a massive scale, using them as propaganda and educational tools. Photography was an essential part of the movement, especially in children’s books such as Egor-Monter (Egor the Electrician, 1928), in which photomontages by Olga and Galina Chichagova of images by Nikolai Zubhov tell the story of an electrician-hero who uses light as a metaphor for knowledge. Women played a significant role in the production of children’s and other photobooks during this period. However, paradoxically, there are few examples of a Soviet woman as the sole author of a photobook. Instead, their contributions were almost always in collaboration—often as husband-and-wife teams such as Stepanova and Aleksandr Rodchenko—with credits usually assigned to the men.

Ulmann’s soft-focus yet realistic examination of the Gullahs’ hard-lived faces and harsh living conditions presents her subjects almost as receding memories brought back from oblivion—a paradox that creates the images’ inner tension.

An American Machine Age aesthetic—with its technological innovations, factory assembly lines, shiny skyscrapers and industrial design, represented in the work of painters like Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth and Georgia O’Keeffe—paralleled that in Europe but without the stylistic extremes of Futurism and Orphic Cubism. Margaret Bourke-White’s Eyes on Russia (1931) documents the quasi-religious machine fervor of the Soviet Union during Stalin’s first five-year plan when the country transitioned from an agricultural society to an industrial center. Unlike her Soviet peers and proponents of Modernism and New Objectivity, Bourke-White seldom used extreme perspectives to showcase Soviet workers as heroes. Instead, she favored a middle view where workers posed mid-movement within carefully lit spaces that included machines. In contrast to Krull’s view of a hallucinatory and fragmented industrial world devoid of human presence, Bourke-White’s photographs relay a harmonious, optimistic collaboration between man and machine—one closer to the American photo-documentary tradition initiated by Lewis Hine.

In Europe, and especially in Germany, the New Woman’s liberation began with a focus on the woman’s body. Inspired by Nacktkultur, an early 20th-century German naturism movement that spawned an extensive network of private clubs and schools, Dr. Bess Mensendieck, one of the first American female physicians, regarded nudism as an aspect of feminism—an idea that would help promote a new, modern identity for women in both the United States and Europe. Along with Alice Bloch and Dora Menzler, Hedwig Hagemann was part of a group that followed and adapted Mensendieck’s teachings. Like psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, whose therapy advocated the liberation of blocked energy in the body, many women believed that the life of the mind could be enhanced through the senses, with nudity breaking down boundaries between classes and leading to social change. Beyond illustrating gymnastics, Olga Linckelmann and Georg Riebicke’s photographs in Hagemann’s Über Körper und Seele der Frau (About Body and the Woman’s Soul, 1927) evoke the paintings of Arthur Bowen Davies, expressionist dance and Isadora Duncan’s “barefoot modernism.” They also possess more than a hint of homoeroticism, another reminder that the New Woman concept sought to erase gender distinctions.

At the release of Doris Ulmann’s Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933), the United States had just emerged from the worst of the Great Depression. In tandem with a text by Julia Peterkin, Ulmann’s photographs of Depression-era African Americans from the Gullah region of South Carolina combine her earlier pictorialist sensibility with a stark, modern documentary style to present portraits as psychological studies. In her chain gang photographs, for instance, the prisoners’ body language and facial expressions convey both their defiance and longing. Ulmann’s soft-focus yet realistic examination of the Gullahs’ hard-lived faces and harsh living conditions presents her subjects almost as receding memories brought back from oblivion—a paradox that creates the images’ inner tension. While photographs taken in the South by Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers Marion Post Wolcott and Dorothea Lange were intent on changing public attitudes by depicting the plight of the underprivileged, Ulmann’s images, done four years earlier, did not necessarily have a social justice agenda. Rather than seeking material help, the Gullahs portrayed by Ulmann seem only to ask for recognition.

While Errell and Thorbecke’s books looked outward to other cultures, Aveux non avenus (Disavowals, 1930) by surrealist Claude Cahun looked to the self as a means to explore the limits of gender. 

Ellen Kolban Thorbecke (also known as Ellen Catleen) and Lotte Errell’s work, photographed in China and Africa respectively, showcase the emergence of women in the rising fields of photojournalism and ethnographic travel. Working outside Europe provided these self-taught photographers a sense of liberation from Western social constraints, politics and customs. Both were gifted authors and photographers who wrote documentary texts and used Rolleiflex cameras to shoot pictures for photobooks that created a “word and picture” form parallel to the photo-essays published in avant-garde European magazines such as AIZ, Vu and Regards.

Errell was among many European Jewish women in the Weimar Republic who pursued a career in photography, one of the few fields accessible to women without academic credentials. Similar to the extraordinary Swiss photographer and writer Ella Maillart—whose publications include Des monts Célestes aux sables Rouges (From the Celestial Mountains to the Red Sands, 1934) and Oasis interdites (Forbidden Journey, 1937)—Errell became interested in ethnological reportage and published Kleine Reise zu schwarzen Menschen (A Little Journey to Black People, 1931) after traveling to Ghana in 1928. During the early 1930s, a period of “East Meets West,”[2] China was a frequent topic for western writers, filmmakers and artists such as Pearl Buck, Josef Von Sternberg and André Malraux, as well as Thorbecke, whose Peking Studies (1934) and People of China (1935) are a mix of travel diary and social documentary. Unlike professional anthropologists, they did not look for systems or types but focused on individual people and the details of their lives. Errell’s close-up photographs of women and children and Thorbecke’s portraits of Chinese people in all walks of life use a straightforward documentary approach, at times colored by a colonialist perspective and the aesthetics of the New Vision..