This may be of interest. It is an exhibition entitled Women of Our Time at the National Portrait Gallery. Link courtesy of Ariana French at Artnotes

I generally find national portrait galleries overly stuffy and avoid them. But this exhibition is very affirmative. Rightly so. The achievements of these women should be celebrated.

Here is a site that explores the work of women photographers.

One women photographer who should be celebrated is Imogen Cunningham, who made a living doing portraits:

She was an early Modernist in the West Coast American style, and did close up studies of plant forms in the 1920's and 1930s:

Most of this work was about beauty as form. This school of photographic modernists saw themselves as artists and understood art in terms of beauty.

More of Cunningham's work can be found here

You can find more about Imogen Cunningham here and here.

I admired the work entitled After Ninety. where she photographed people in their nineties. A book was published posthumously in 1977.

After ninety. That is what I call affirmation.

And today? Courtesy of Rick over at Artrift we have the work of Sally Mann. She has has integrated the camera into her everyday life:

We then get portraits of her family such as this:

In aesthetic terms it is beauty and ugliness linked dialectically. We have moved a long way from the early photographic modernists.

The avant garde dream of art being integrated with life has been realised by photography in a way that affirms everyday life.