30 For 30: Digital Enabling
To celebrate Women’s History Month, PWP will feature items from its 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.
Stages of a 1980s issue of The PWP Times
1999 PWP publication
In 1975 when PWP was founded, MS Magazine was just a few years old and had been expected to fail. But the first issue sold out, proving the hunger women had for authentic content created by and for them, not forced on them.
1975 was also the year Microsoft and Apple Computer were founded. The first PWP publications were assembled with typewriters and tape, but as the digital tide swept in, paste-up gave way to crude daisy wheel printout, then eye-popping layout in the 1990s as Photoshop and page layout programs emerged. Show announcements went from grainy black-and-white to tepid color then spectacular color; from snail mail to screen.
Issues of PWP’s IMPRINTS Magazine
Invitation for the Breadth of Vision Show at FIT (left) and for PWP shows over the years
As the desktop became virtual, the production of everything changed. Historically women lacked access to channels of communication, but through digital and online publishing, voices once silent joined in a roar. Suddenly the sisters weren’t just reaching the street corner with flyers as they did for the 1975 Breadth of Vision show, they were reaching the world. And with a few clicks, the world and its vast store of information was reaching them. Query letters and printed flyers were things of the past.
Early query letter to PWP
PWP Facebook content viewed on a mobile phone 2018
– 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