I have seen only three photographs of my father’s mother. In each she is neatly dressed and proud of her son, who is the reason the picture was taken. There are perhaps 10 images of my granny on my mother’s side; half are studio photos, a few more casually posed. These are images of people making a picture of themselves for future eyes, including mine, and their hopefulness makes me nostalgic. My granny is also accidentally included in a portrait of my mother’s dog, taken out in the garden. There she is in the background, scrubbing away at something in a zinc tub. Her sleeve is rolled up and the bare arm is shocking, though not indecent. Very thin and working hard, its whiteness shows how rarely her skin was in the sunshine. It looks so real.
If you want to imagine the privacy of the past, the shame it protected, or the way it was used to control women, just look to the many parts of the world where it still exists. Last month, the Iraqi social media influencer with the handle Om Fahad was shot dead, after her release from prison, for dancing on TikTok and talking about makeup and clothes.
The pictures I see so easily online might once have been divided into “personal” or “public” but, these days, it can be hard to tell the difference. And though the algorithms tend towards prettiness or atrocity, it seems that no aspect of female life now goes unrecorded. If I pick up my phone, I can be served – whether I want to see it or not – a woman revealing to her husband that she is finally pregnant; a woman standing in rubble and weeping at the death of her family; a woman laughing while hitting her child, hard, with an egg; a fit woman doing a handstand; a woman recommending a book by another woman, or by herself; a woman painting or protesting. Other phones, in other hands, see women differently – some, at a guess, very differently indeed.
The pictures I get are curated for me and towards some idea of “self-fulfilment”, but there are days when that seems an idealisation too far, and belief drains out. “Oh, her again,” I say. “In her fantasy life.” Can someone really be “seen” in the mirror of their own lens, or is it just their self-regard that is on display?
But as you look at a Kardashian selfie, consider how many rules had to be broken to get her to this moment of self-commodification. I sometimes feel progress, for women, is not a line but a kind of shattering into multiple individual pathways. Each to her own, you might say.
There are now more than 4tn images in personal storage on Google Photos and 3.2bn images are shared online every day – a number of them by my family, who often send photographs instead of text. “Here I am.” “This is what I think.” Search. Laugh. Send. Pictures are easy: they are complex and complete – much less contentious, in our house, than words.
But they still matter. My children, filmed by people and machines every day of their lives, have iron-clad rules about snapping and (God forbid!) posting, which mostly involve vetting and deleting stuff from their parents’ phones. The lens has not lost its power to claim and possess. This is especially true when it is pointed at a woman. Even when the camera is in her control.
Most of the pictures reproduced here happened on paper. They were events; passed from hand to hand, then gone. You couldn’t “look them up”, except in your mind. Their impact required a sense of bounded public life that could be shattered by new truths. Or they expanded the visual grammar available to women, and this was also considered shocking. Some broke the barrier between public and personal to reveal everyday secrets about domestic violence, poverty or abortion. The most powerful show women existing instead of “appearing”, captured in motion, uninterested in the lens. The wittiest show those who own the pose.
How do you feel about the passive state of being “seen” – does it make you feel understood or exposed? The best photographs, the ones that bring about change, do both. They expose the context and help us understand the subject. They show us what she is going through.