This website supports our online symposium on 1 June 2022, which focused on an often-neglected aspect of photography history - photographs of and by women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and more broadly, women and early photography around the world.
The project is inspired by our exploration of photographs taken by the Aberdeen-based photography studio of George Washington Wilson (1823-1893), who was named the Photographer Royal for Scotland in 1860. His collection is housed at the University of Aberdeen library, and consists of over 37,000 glass plate negatives, produced by the firm that he, and then his sons, headed from the 1850s to 1908. It includes landscapes, cityscapes, and portrait photographs from across Britain and its former colonies and beyond. The GWW Collection includes diverse representations of women, in terms of their location, class, occupation, and ethnicity.
The symposium consisted of four panels, each containing six or seven presentations by contributors from around the world. Recordings from the sessions are available to be watched from each panel's individual page.
