This is a timeline of women in photography tracing the major contributions women have made to both the development of photography and the outstanding photographs they have created over the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
Julia Margaret Cameron was a British photographer who is considered one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorians and for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature.
Eve Arnold, OBE (honorary), FRPS (honorary) was an American photojournalist, long-resident in the UK. She joined Magnum Photos agency in 1951, and became a full member in 1957. She was the first woman to join the agency. She frequently photographed Marilyn Monroe, including candid-style photos on the set of The Misfits (1961).
The carte de visite was a format of small photograph which was patented in Paris by photographer André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri in 1854, although first used by Louis Dodero.
Louise Emma Augusta Dahl-Wolfe was an American photographer. She is known primarily for her work for Harper's Bazaar, in association with fashion editor Diana Vreeland. At Harper's Bazaar she pioneered a new standard in color photography.
André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri was a French photographer who started his photographic career as a daguerreotypist but gained greater fame for patenting his version of the carte de visite, a small photographic image which was mounted on a card. Disdéri, a brilliant showman, made this system of mass-production portraiture world famous.
In Denmark, photography has developed from strong participation and interest in the very beginnings of the art in 1839 to the success of a considerable number of Danes in the world of photography today.
The participation of women in photography goes back to the very origins of the process. Several of the earliest women photographers, most of whom were from Britain or France, were married to male pioneers or had close relationships with their families. It was above all in northern Europe that women first entered the business of photography, opening studios in Denmark, France, Germany, and Sweden from the 1840s, while it was in Britain that women from well-to-do families developed photography as an art in the late 1850s. Not until the 1890s, did the first studios run by women open in New York City.
Louise Ozelle Martin was an American professional photographer who received recognition for her photographs of Houston Freedom Riders, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and beyond. She is known as a pioneer for African-American female photographers.
Bertha Wehnert-Beckmann was a German photographer. She appears to have been Germany's first professional female photographer, and was possibly also the first professional female photographer in the world, being active a few years prior to Brita Sofia Hesselius and Geneviève Élisabeth Disdéri. Together with her husband, she opened a studio in Leipzig in 1843 and ran the business herself from his death in 1847.
The practice and appreciation of photographyin the United States began in the 19th century, when various advances in the development of photography took place and after daguerreotype photography was introduced in France in 1839. The earliest commercialization of photography was made in the country when Alexander Walcott and John Johnson opened the first commercial portrait gallery in 1840. In 1866, the first color photograph was taken. Only in the 1880s, would photography expand to a mass audience with the first easy-to-use, lightweight Kodak camera, issued by George Eastman and his company.
Marilyn Jean Stafford was a British photographer. Born and raised in the United States, she moved to Paris as a young woman, where she began working as a photojournalist. She settled in London, but travelled and worked across the world, including in Tunisia, India, and Lebanon. Her work was published in The Observer and other newspapers. Stafford also worked as a fashion photographer in Paris, where she photographed models in the streets in everyday situations, rather than in the more usual opulent surroundings.
Louise Franziska Möllinger (1817–1880) was a pioneering German-born Swiss photographer who worked with daguerreotypes in the early 1840s. She is thought to be the first female photographer who was active in Switzerland. Möllinger was also the first in Switzerland to use lithography as a means of publishing multiple copies of her landscapes as early as 1844.
Photography in India refers to both historical as well as to contemporary photographs taken in modern-day India.
Photographs have been taken in the area now known as Canada since 1839, by both amateurs and professionals. In the 19th century, commercial photography focussed on portraiture. But professional photographers were also involved in political and anthropological projects: they were brought along on expeditions to Western Canada and were engaged to document Indigenous peoples in Canada by government agencies.