Women photographers and the domestic studio

Keeley Bentley is a photographer and educator who is currently studying her PhD at The School of Digital Arts (Manchester Metropolitan University).

My PhD thesis study identified the links between Victorian women photographers and their use of domestic space to create work. I have been lucky enough to spend many days and hours researching the photographic collections at the V&A, with one aim: to look at how women and girls have been presented in front of the lens since its invention. Yet, I ended up being more interested in how the women behind the lens created narratives that stretched far beyond the walls of their family homes.

Looking at the role of the Victorian woman photographer also encouraged me to explore how I could work in domestic spaces within my own photographic practice. My research focussed on the work of two Victorian photographers, Viscountess Clementina Hawarden and Julia Margaret Cameron. The joy their work brings me as a researcher and photographer has been a pleasure to experience, and their power to turn their family home into something of a spectacle was something that changed my own approach to photography.

Clementina Hawarden’s photographs present young women and girls in lavish costumes, with the domestic space transformed by natural light that mimics the lighting style of a contemporary commercial studio. Her imagery presents the girls as professional models of the period; yet these were her daughters, and she was documenting them in the family home. Her ability to use the camera and natural light is something that studio and fashion photographers still mimic to this day. Hawarden produced around 850 images over seven years; the domestic is ever-present. The staged portraits of young girls propel a theatricality to the realm of the domestic, and the spatial irregularity of Hawarden’s composition is still celebrated today. But her work is not nearly as recognised or showcased as her Victorian counterpart, Julia Margaret Cameron.

I quickly concluded that women photographers tended to work in safe spaces. Of course, the constraints of heavy photographic equipment for Victorians were a far cry from how easy we have it today, with cameras in our pockets every moment. So, the domestic space would be the easiest place to set up a studio in which to create photography.

For Cameron and Hawarden, It was also perhaps due to the limitations of being a mother. I come from a working-class background; I studied photography at my local college; I was a single mum throughout my studies, and did not have much time or money spare when creating work, so using the domestic space was also crucial for me to create work. I was always hugely inspired by looking at how Julia Margaret Cameron used simple props to create narratives from storybooks and fantasies alike. While our experiences and backgrounds may be very different, there are similarities in the role of Victorian and contemporary women using the domestic space. We are mothers, carers, lovers and everything in between; we may work other jobs to pay for our practice or just take it up as a hobby – which, was often where women photographers like Cameron started. Many of the women I know who work within the field today use their home within their practice in one way or another due to the constraints of a busy life.

Lady Clementina Hawarden raised ten children, eight of which were girls. Cameron raised eleven children, five of her own, five orphaned children of relatives, and an Irish girl named Mary Ryan whom she found begging on Putney Heath, and whom Cameron used as a model in her photographs. The presentation of working-class models in the Victorian period is one that I found fascinating. Looking at how Julia Margaret Cameron photographed Mary Ryan, I found a disparity compared to Cameron’s pictures of her own daughters. Ryan is usually very isolated, with very basic attempts to dress her up, other than when she appears in a group alongside Julia’s other children, for example, in The five foolish Virgins.

This changed the focus of my research, and I started to seek out working-class narratives within the Victorian photographic archive, which seemed largely missing. Cameron’s choice of titles for her images of Ryan, such as The Irish Immigrant indicated a subjectivity in how the working class were being depicted. Both Cameron and Hawarden were of middle to upper-class descent, and photography as a medium was notably an aristocratic medium that only the upper class and the elite could afford. I started to think about the working class in general in the photographic archive and specifically the women working class – where were these stories? Why had they been silenced? We tend to never really see the working-class narrative, only the upper to middle class ‘dressed up’ as the working class.

Doing a practice-based PhD as a photographer, I set out to create work from spaces related to my adolescence, and mimic the role of the Victorian photographer – to create the work I felt was missing from the archive and tell my own story. I used the methodologies that Victorian photographers used; I borrowed my family members as models, and I used my home to photograph and set out to tell my millennial story. You can see the influences of Cameron’s disregard for perfection, which was intentional, and the use of the mirror so prevalent in Hawarden’s work, throughout the images I have created.