Lebart, Luce and Marie Robert. Une histoire mondiale des femmes photographes. Paris: Les Éditions Textuel, 2020.
English translation: Lebart, Luce and Marie Robert. A World History of Women Photographers. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2022.
Edited by two French historians Luce Lebart and Marie Robert, Une histoire mondiale des femmes photographes (World History of Woman Photographers) is the first reference work on woman photographers that is both international in scope and covers a long period of time, from the origins of photography to the present day.
Lebart and Robert invited a variety of authors to help them compile this highly ambitious project. Amongst them Photography of China’s founder Dr Marine Cabos-Brullé wrote the biographies of the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908), China’s notorious head of state during the final decades of the imperial era, and Isabella Bird (1831-1904), the celebrated female traveller-photographers and writer known for her momentous journeys across various continents.
A richly illustrated volume of at least 600 pages, this reference work is not only scientifically exemplary but also accessible to the general public thanks to its engaging, lively narrative style and its carefully designed contemporary layout.
About the Editors
Luce Lebart is a historian of photography, exhibition curator, and French correspondent for the Archive of Modern Conflict (London and Toronto). She was director of the Canadian Photography Institute from 2016 to 2018, after being director of collections at the Société Française de Photographie from 2011 to 2015. She was previously in charge of visual documents held in the archives of the département of l'Hérault. She curated La guerre des gosses (2013), Souvenirs du sphinx (2015) and Lady Liberty (2016) at the Rencontres d'Arles, Illuminations (Bologna, 2015), Tâches et traces. Hippolyte Bayard (Beauvais, 2015), Frontera (National Gallery of Canada, 2017) et Gold and Silver (National Gallery of Canada and Amsterdam Museum of Photography, 2018). Her exhibition in 2019 in Arles focused on the archives of the CNRS.
Marie Robert has been chief curator in charge of the photography collection at the Musée d’Orsay since 2011. She has curated some ten exhibitions presenting the collection from a social and historic perspective (Images pauvres, images de pauvres, Les Petites Misères du photographe, Du Coq à l’Âne, La Confusion du genre, etc.), and co-curated Misia, Reine de Paris (2012), Splendeurs et Misères.Images de la prostitution (2015) and Qui a peur des femmes photographes ? (2015). She has lectured on the history of photography seen through the prism of gender at the École du Louvre (2014-2017). Her research and publications focus on the place of women in the history of photography, as well as the ways photography and other media interrelate. She has been tasked with bringing cinema back into the permanent exhibitions of the Musée d’Orsay in 2019.
