As Susan Sontag observed in On Photography, great images can act as memento mori, interrupting the flow of time by freezing moments that are otherwise fleeting. But the power to make – and be remembered for – such images has never been evenly distributed. For much of the twentieth century, women faced formidable barriers to working as photographers, their contributions often sidelined within the male-dominated field.
Women Photographers 1900–1975: A Legacy of Light, a major new exhibition at the NGV, sets out to redress that imbalance – putting women back in the frame and revisiting the history of 20th-century photography.
Running until May 3, 2026, the exhibit brings together more than 300 photographs, prints, photobooks and magazines by 80-plus artists, spanning portraiture, photojournalism, fashion, documentary and the avant-garde. From the suffrage movement through to the women’s liberation era, this period reveals how women used the camera to record, reflect on and challenge the world around them.
Drawn entirely from the NGV Collection, the exhibition features more than 170 recently acquired works, with 130 on public view for the first time. Recognisable images sit alongside lesser-known ones, revealing the dense international networks that connected women photographers from Melbourne to Tokyo and Paris to Buenos Aires.
Highlights include Dorothea Lange’s 'Migrant Mother' (1936), one of the defining images of the Great Depression; Lee Miller’s portrait of Man Ray in Paris; and Olive Cotton’s elegant modernist experiments with light, shadow and form. Elsewhere, works by Ilse Bing, Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore, Ponch Hawkes and Tina Modotti demonstrate how women pushed photography into new conceptual, political and aesthetic territory.
Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of International Women’s Year, Women Photographers 1900–1975: A Legacy of Light offers a necessary and long-overdue reframing of photographic history. Click the link here to buy tickets and discover more.
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