We are excited to announce a major project the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, is starting: In support of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative, we will be digitizing and describing 14 collections created by women photographers in Africa! All of the women photographers were trailblazers in their respective fields and professions – art, anthropology, architecture, art history, geography, photojournalism, travel – and used photography as a tool for documentation, ethnographic field research, or ‘salvage photography’ to produce fleeting glimpses of what were perceived as rapidly ‘vanishing’ cultures and ways of life. These women exercised different cultural and social sensitivities when it came to photographing indigenous peoples in local and domestic settings.
Each month we will feature a different woman from the project. This month we will explore the life and photographs of Constance Stuart Larrabee!
