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.
Early 19th-century pioneers
1839
Sarah Anne Bright (1793–1866) produces what is possibly the earliest surviving photographic image taken by a woman.[1]
Constance Fox Talbot (1811–1880), wife of the inventor Henry Fox Talbot, experiments with the process of photography, possibly becoming the first woman to take a photograph.[2]
1842
Franziska Möllinger (1817–1880) becomes the first female photographer in Switzerland, taking daguerreotypes of Swiss scenes which she publishes as lithographs in 1844.[3]
1843
Anna Atkins (1799–1871), also a friend of Henry Fox Talbot, publishes Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, the first book with photographic illustrations.[4]
Bertha Beckmann (1815–1901), opens a studio with her husband in Leipzig, running the business herself from his death in 1847.[5]
1844
Jessie Mann (1805–1867) takes a photograph of the King of Saxony, probably becoming the first woman photographer in Scotland.[6]
Mary Steen (1856–1939) becomes Denmark's first female court photographer.[25]
1890
Sarah J. Eddy (1851–1945) begins exhibiting photographs. Her most important exhibitions were at the New School of American Photography and the selection of American Women photographers at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900.[26]
Julie Laurberg (1856–1925) opens a large successful photography business in Copenhagen's Magasin du Nord where she employed many women. Supported women's professional participation in photography.[28]
Julia Margaret Cameron's portrait of her daughter Annie (1864)
Thora Hallager's portrait of Hans Christian Andersen (1869)
Emilie Bieber's Quatuor Florentin (c.1875)
Elizabeth Pulman's portrait of Rewi Manga Maniapoto (1879)
Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione self portrait (1895)
Mary Steen's photograph of Queen Victoria and Princess Beatrice (1895)
Early 20th century
1900
Gertrude Käsebier (1852–1934) sold prints of her 1899 photograph "The Manger" (a portrait of fellow photographer Frances W. Delehanty) for $100, "the highest price ever paid for a photograph" to that time.[31]
Dora Kallmus (1881–1963) establishes a fashion studio in Vienna, later creating portraits of celebrities.[36]
1909
The Women's Federation of the Photographers Association of America holds its organizational meeting in Rochester, New York, with Mary Carnell as its first president.[37]
Katherine Russell Bleecker (1893–1996) makes three films about prison reform this year, using her own cameras. She is sometimes credited as the first professional camerawoman in American film.[39]
1916
Trude Fleischmann (1895–1990) embarks on her career as a professional photographer, creating outstanding portraits of intellectuals and artists.[40]
1917
Naciye Suman (1881–1973) creates a studio in Istanbul, becoming Turkey's first female photographer.[41]
1920s
Marie al-Khazen (1899–1983) was a Lebanese photographer active in the 1920s; the photographs she created are considered to constitute a valuable and unique record of their time and place.[42]
Elise Forrest Harleston (February 8, 1891 – 1970) was an early African-American photographer who set up a studio in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1922 that lasted into the early 1930s.
Gerda Taro (1910–1937) is killed while covering the Spanish Civil War, becoming the first woman photojournalist to have died while working on the frontline.[49]
Tsuneko Sasamoto (1914–2022) joined the Japanese Photographic Society in 1940, becoming Japan's first female photojournalist.[52]
Carlotta Corpron (December 9, 1901 – April 17, 1988) begins making the "light drawings" that establish her as a pioneer of American abstract photography.
Bearing Witness, a documentary for American television, follows five women war journalists working in Iraq, including photographer Molly Bingham and camerawoman Mary Rogers.
^Peterson, Christian A. (2012). Pictorial Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts: History of Exhibitions, Publications, and Acquisitions with Biographies of All 243 Pictorialists in the Collection. Minneapolis, Minn.: Privately Published. p. 71. OCLC824617933.