Posts in Category : Featured Articles
30 For 30: Reaching Out
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. A few years back, PWP member Andy Mars read an article about how children who’d had their picture taken by a professional photographer were more likely to be adopted than those who hadn’t. Realizing the good photography could do in the world, she began the PWP Community Service initiative. Each year the committee would choose a deserving nonprofit to help with the gift of creative photography. The first organization selected was historic University Settlement House, founded in 1886 to help immigrants [continue reading...]
30 For 30: Continuity Through Change
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. PWP meetings were modeled on the consciousness raising groups of Women’s Lib. The first ones were held in apartments, then at Photographics Unlimited, Eastman Kodak, the Photo District Gallery, Pratt School of Professional Studies, St. Paul the Apostle Church, and now at the Metropolitan Opera Guild. Through changes of location and vast changes in the field, each month from September through June, PWP meets to conduct business and hear a prominent photographer, usually a woman, speak about their life and art. [continue reading...]
30 For 30: Honoring the Upcoming
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. In 2005, under President Fran Dickson, PWP developed a Student Awards program to encourage and support young women interested in photography. “Not having a physical location,” she wrote, “we decided to offer cash awards to young women photographers….The program started with junior and seniors in NYC schools and soon expanded to all high school students in the New York metropolitan area.” Though the development of camera phones allowed for constant casual snaps, the PWP Student Awards helped focus the young photographers’ [continue reading...]
30 For 30: PWP Goes Live!
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. 1975 was the founding year not only for PWP, but also for Microsoft and Apple Computer. At the time, most people couldn’t imagine how digital technology would change not only the way they took pictures, but the way they lived. In PWP’s earliest days ads, memos, and publications were done on paper. But in 1999, Babs Armour led an effort to create a website that would make the organization accessible from anywhere in the world. The first version of pwponline.org launched [continue reading...]
30 For 30: The Great Change Sweeps In
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 women, photography, and the world have come since 1975. PWP was born in an analogue world in 1975. There was no online anything, so word of the organization was spread by publications printed on paper: In those publications were ads for film services and darkroom facilities: But the world was changing fast. Here is an ad for a computer workshop at Photographics Unlimited, the darkroom complex where PWP held meetings in the early 1980s: The pace of technological accelerated rapidly in photography and the world at large. In 1998, PWP invited [continue reading...]