Busy Hands, Light Work : Toward a Feminist Historiography of Hand‐Made Photography in the Era of the ‘New Materiality’

Reflecting on the construction of printmaking within its own historiography, Kathryn Reeves suggests that it has always been coded as feminine, its technical language of bleed and matrix invoking the absent body through which images are not created but only reproduced. In this chapter, the author examines some of the neglected implications of the material turn, particularly the close relationship between constructions of photography, materiality and femininity, both past and present. By addressing the new materiality through a focus on the hand‐made picture, and taking as her examples a series of practices by women in which photographs are manipulated with needle and thread, the author re‐forges severed connections to a photographic tradition that has been ignored and devalued. Deliberately seeking out mundane subject matter, Betty Hahn saw her use of photography as a form of contemporary folk art, democratic in its mode of appeal: as she put it, 'everybody's snapshots look alike'.