MARGERY MANN / ANNE NOGGLE, Women of Photography: An Historical Survey, San Francisco Museum of Art, 1975

Published for one of the more ambitious early institutional attempts to write women back into the history of photography. Organized by Margery Mann and Anne Noggle, the exhibition opened at the San Francisco Museum of Art on 18 April 1975 before travelling to the Museum of New Mexico, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and Wellesley College Museum. Contemporary accounts describe some 250 photographs, ranging from the nineteenth century to then-current work.

The catalogue assembles around 50 photographers whose work had rarely been allowed to occupy a single historical narrative: Julia Margaret Cameron, Gertrude Käsebier and Alice Austen alongside Berenice Abbott, Tina Modotti, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Lisette Model, Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark, Judy Dater, Sonia Landy Sheridan and others.

The date carries more than it first appears to. 1975 was International Women's Year, and the exhibition arrived as feminist art history was beginning to force museums to confront how their supposedly neutral canons had been built. It was also the year the museum itself changed its name — from the San Francisco Museum of Art, founded in 1935, to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This catalogue carries the institution's original title, printed in the same year it was retired: an institution formally becoming "modern" in name, while inside its galleries a very different argument was being made about whose history modern photography had actually recorded. The introduction came from John Humphrey, who had joined the museum's staff in 1935 and spent four decades establishing its photography program — the institution's own founding advocate for the medium, writing the welcome to a show built to correct the canon he had helped assemble.

Mann and Noggle did not simply gather contemporary women photographers; they went backwards through the medium and constructed a genealogy stretching from Cameron and Käsebier through to Arbus, Lange, Model, Mark and younger practitioners then still entering the historical record. The New Mexico Museum of Art now describes the exhibition as a groundbreaking contribution to photographic history.

The individual images make the argument better than a manifesto could: Barbara Morgan's theatrical experimentation, Berenice Abbott's New York, Carlotta Corpron's abstraction, Dorothea Lange's street observation, Imogen Cunningham's magnolia, Lisette Model's uncompromising bodies. Not a category at the edge of photography, but photography itself reconstructed through the people routinely left outside its history.

Interior remains the important part of the object.