International Women's Day - Hundred Heroines
The 8th March was International Women's Day and celebrated the achievements of women across the world as well as highlighting those areas where more effort needs to be made to ensure equality. Sadly there is still quite a lot of the latter. A good time it seemed to me to draw attention to an amazing, informative and very focussed attempt to give universal recognition to women in photography - past, present and future. It is called Hundred Heroines and is a UK based charity that encourages diverse representation within the field of photography for women.
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Among the organisations aims are challenging the way we see the world, pushing boundaries, tackling taboo subjects and highlighting inequality as well as examining difficult social issues. It doesn't take a huge examination of their excellent website to see that they successfully manage all these things.
Hundred Heroines started its journey in 2018 when the Royal Photographic Society ran a campaign to identify outstanding women photographers around the globe. This was to mark the centenary of the right to vote for women in the UK. Over 5000 people nominated more than 1300 possible candidates. From this list a panel selected a final list which they called The One Hundred Heroines.
New Heroines are being added as the work of the organisation develops and a page for 2020 has been added. It has been interesting for me to see familiar heroines (Aneta Grzeszykowska, Hannah Reyes Morales, Nan Goldin, Shirin Neshat and Sally Mann - some of whom I have written about previously in blogs) as well as find a whole world of new photographers and themes of which I was ignorant. Past heroines are celebrated too and what a list that is!
The resources behind this site are many with news about exhibitions around the world featuring heroines as well as online exhibitions (Today is Hard explores the pandemic for instance with some wonderful stories and metaphors) and online films about feminism, feminists and photography. You can spend a lot of time exploring and enjoying this incredible site.
The photos on this page show just five of the women photographers whose stories I did not know previously and I have created links in their names that will help you explore more about them too.
Thank you for the lovely write up!