A sentence on p. 4 of the Spring 2024 issue of Almanac caught my attention: "Charlotte Randall, a mother of six, was a photographer in the small town of Clyde, Ohio." A woman making a living as a photographer for the cartes-de-visite so popular in the latter half of the 19th C? Whoo-hoo! Of course, I knew about female art photographers from Julia Margaret Cameron to Gertrude Käsebier, but women in the ordinary, everyday commercial world offers something new area to explore. One place to start is a Wikipedia Timelime of women in photography. Another is the article Zooming in on the places where early women photographers could build a career. And right off the bat, fiction writers, what do you make of these two midcentury women with the daguerreotype camera? Just look at those facial expressions!
Image via Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art