To celebrate Women’s History Month, we’re featuring items from the PWP Archives* each day on this blog. In looking back, we see not only where we started, but how far photography, women, and the world have come since 1975.

Because there was no Internet in the 1970s, ads for PWP were placed in newspapers and magazines like Vogue, The Village Voice, and Photo District News (now PDN). The idea of an organization dedicated to women photographers was a novelty at the time, and letters seeking information about it poured in.

An ad in The Village Voice invited photographers to a slide lecture by Ruth Orkin:

The 1981 issue of Photo District News where PWP was mentioned cost fifty cents. At the time, there was a real Photo District on Manhattan’s West Side that ran from 14th Street up to the mid-30s. It included photo labs that processed black-and-white and color film, as well as gelatin silver, C, and Cibachrome prints. As the digital tide swept in, these places began to disappear.

– Catherine Kirkpatrick

*The PWP Archives were acquired by the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library of Emory University

Links to all the 30 For 30 Women’s History Month blogs:

Help Me Please! Hopelessly Waiting…

Exhibition and Anger

Spreading the Word

Early Ads On Paper

Cards and Letters

A Lady, a Truck, a Singing Dog

Women of Vision

A Show of Their Own

Taking It To the Street

Sisters of Sister Cities

Sold!

Education and More

Face of a Changing City

Digital Enabling

Expanding Walls and Other Possibilities

A Wonderful Life–Lady Style

Branding–the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Great Change Sweeps In

PWP Goes Live!

Honoring the Upcoming

Continuity Through Change

Reaching Out

Eye a Woman Naked

Rapidly Multiplying Alternative Options

Women In the World, As Themselves

Kudos!

Friends Who Overcame and Inspired

Reversing the Gaze

Photography and More

Chicks Telling It Like It Is

Looking Back With Thanks