Please Touch the Art

In Getty’s new exhibition What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women 1843–1999, you are invited to touch, hold, and flip through the pages of more than 100 women’s photobooks, immersing yourself in a rich history of women’s photography.

That history spans the 1840s to the present, various geographical locations, and a variety of themes, styles, and photographic methods and techniques.

A photobook is a collection of photographs organized in book form and crafted to tell a story or showcase a theme. Artists have used them for all kinds of purposes, including as family photo albums, volumes that double as sculptures, ethnographic and sociological photo studies, hastily compiled scrapbooks offering intimate reflections on domestic life, DIY protest zines, and other types of unusual print and ephemeral publications.

Today, the photobook is not only a format to present and share photography; it has developed into a unique art form that can take you on a visual journey distinct from the experience of viewing photos on gallery walls or watching a slideshow on a screen.

Why this show?

As with all areas of art history, women artists, artists of color, and queer artists have traditionally been excluded from photobook anthologies. When Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich read The Photobook: A History, the popular catalogue by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger published in 2004, they found that only 10 percent of the artists featured were women. This statistic compelled them to compile their own anthology, What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999, which features books that span the beginnings of photography in the 19th century to the introduction of digital art in the 1990s, revealing diverse narratives of women’s history across decades, continents, and social contexts.

The new exhibition—inspired by the anthology—lets you engage with a curated selection of women’s photobooks and trace, question, and reshape this history.

What you’ll discover

A facsimile of Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Ferns by Anna Atkins (1799–1871) offers an album of images of botanical specimens from around the world. Though Atkins is often recognized as the first person to create a photobook, her contributions have historically been overlooked, with early art historians dismissing her work as not “true photography.” After Atkins’s time, though, the camera in women’s hands became a powerful social and artistic tool. It enabled women to transform the everyday into art and share stories of travel, protest, equal rights, self-discovery, and the body in playful and experimental ways.

Other books in the show range from works by globally recognized artists—such as Barbara Kruger’s Thinking of You (1999)—to pieces by under-recognized creators. For instance, in What’s Happening with Momma? (1988), Clarissa Sligh reimagines the family photo album by creating a foldout photobook sculpture through which she reflects on her childhood and the portrayal of the Black female body in domestic spaces.

Two interconnected themes recurring throughout the exhibition are the varying worldviews of locals and travelers. Visitors can consider Argentina through two unique lenses by comparing a couple of books from Special Collections at the Getty Research Institute (GRI): Pasos por Buenos Aires (1959) by Italian photographer Laura Quilici, and Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires (1968) by Argentinian photographers Alicia d’Amico and Sara Facio. Quilici captures the city at a moment of change, taking on the traditionally male role of the flaneur (an idle man-about-town), while d’Amico and Facio offer a local perspective, providing a contrast to earlier, more detached urban views of the capital.

Another travel book, Eslanda Goode Robeson’s African Journey (1945), challenges colonial narratives, providing an African American woman’s perspective on Africa’s beauty, craft, and people. Robeson’s diary-like entries are accompanied by images of her travels in South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, and Congo.

As the first West Coast What They Saw pop-up reading room, the exhibition will also include a special section on contemporary photobooks by women photographers in Southern California. Among them are Lauren Greenfield’s Girl Culture (2002), Catherine Opie’s 700 Nimes Road (2015), and Laura Aguilar’s Show and Tell (2017).

The power of a hands-on exhibition

How often do we make time to be fully present with one activity or task? Carving out the time to sit with a physical book is a luxury for many of us and something that can go against the pressure to be perpetually productive, multitasking, and digitally connected. Being in the reading room can be a way to rediscover what it feels like to focus deeply and maybe even enter a flow state.

GRI photography curator Isotta Poggi hopes the exhibition will attract younger audiences and shape the way they relate to capturing photos.

“I hope that visitors are inspired to start taking pictures using their phones with intention, thinking, ‘OK, what is my story? Or, what is a story I want to tell?’ The story can be anything. It can be an idea. It can be the reality of a situation. It can be a journey. It can be a diary. Maybe the exhibition will encourage people to use the camera as a storytelling tool for developing a visual language, for weaving a story, and doing it a little differently from their usual way.”

Poggi hopes all audiences will look at these histories, draw connections between artists, decades, and continents, and ponder such questions as: Who has access to publishing? What stories remain waiting to be uncovered? How can I follow the lead of these women and use the camera as a tool for democracy?

What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women 1843–1999 is on view at the Getty Center through May 11, 2025.

The books featured in this exhibition are part of the Getty Library. Learn how to become a Library Reader.