CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/12/2020

We can't get enough of 'The New Woman Behind the Camera,' on view now at The Met

This 1921 portrait of Austrian-Argentine painter Mariette Pachhofer (later Mariette Lydis), by the pioneering Austrian society photographer Madame d'Ora, is reproduced from The New Woman Behind the Camera, published to accompany the enlightening exhibition currently on view at The Met, en route to the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., in the Fall. Featuring work by 120 photographers, including well-known figures like Berenice Abbott, Claude Cahun, Dorothea Lange and Lee Miller, as well as names that will be new to many, this volume is, from beginning to end, a revelation. Down-and-dirty war reportage, documentary, avant-garde abstraction, experimental portraiture, and a whole new way of dealing with fashion meet with all sorts of new international ideas about gender, power and artistic license.

ABOVE: Madame d'Ora, "Mariette Pachhofer (later Mariette Lydis)," 1921, gelatin silver print, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund and the R. K. Mellon Family Foundation.