Located between the archive, darkroom and studio, these works give visibility to the underrepresented role of women in photographic invention.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women were at the centre of the scientific breakthroughs that would later become known as ‘photography’. At a distance of over 200 years, I use reenactment to give form to their still-thrilling pre-photographic moments of discovery.

Through archival research and contemporary photographic art practice, this display focusses on the contributions of peripheral figures in photography’s history. In many cases, their early photographic experiments predated the technology of fixing and stabilising prints. Today, these contributions are no longer visible, having faded or been destroyed by light.

Through a range of processes and creative methods of reenactment and retouching, this work of retrieval repairs and readdresses the canonical narratives which marginalised many women’s contributions to the declared invention of photography in 1839.