articles/Landscape/woman-landscape-page2

Woman on Landscape - part 2 of 1 2

Published 02/02/2015

The Alternative Realities of the Female Artist

It was a blog post by Lynne with the above title that really drew me into reading just about everything she has written on the subject of being a photographer who is also a woman - I'd highly recommend reading her blog for an insight. "Studying Georgia O'Keeffe and Julia Margaret Cameron made me aware of how these women had their art almost completely ignored, meaning that they came up with something completely unique." Lynne also has written several times on the subject of the rarity of landscape photographers who are women, speculating as to why this could be. Her writings have been met with an overwhelmingly positive response with people volunteering their own theories on the subject too. "The impression that I got from my readers was that nearly everybody thought that women were less confident about their work and not as pushy which is why sometimes they can miss out on opportunities for publicity."

Being a woman who shoots landscapes has its upsides too, though - Lynne's apparent rarity as a landscape photographer led to her being asked to represent Zenfolio at Focus On Imaging in Birmingham. "When I worked on the stand for Zenfolio I was inundated by women talking to me because they needed websites for their photography businesses, but almost all of them were photographing babies or portraits. Over the five days that I was there I only met one or two other landscape photographers who were women." Being at Focus led to a chance meeting with the managing director for Lee Filters where Lynne mentioned to him that their book on landscape photographers didn't have a single woman within its pages. Sure enough they put that right in the next edition that came out, before featuring Lynne's work in the first copy of their popular e-magazine! Perhaps there is some truth that 'if you don't ask then you don't get'.

" We have to challenge the fact that many people see the default photographer as male," Lynne tells me. "When I started working in science, people had the same assumption and women are still outnumbered in both fields." Challenging assumptions that people make is difficult, but Lynne has a plan: "I've been trying to pull myself away from doing the traditional landscape shots. It's not that I deliberately want to go in a different direction, but my mind seems to think in a different way. I try to make more intimate landscape images that are quite minimal in appearance." By stepping out and away from the world of the traditional, male-dominated landscape photograph, Lynne is proving that it is possible to do something different and also make a name for your work at the same time. www.crionnaphotography.com

• Woman on Landscape page 1
  
• Woman on Landscape page 2
  

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