The Special Collections department at UMBC includes the Edward L. Bafford Photography Book Collection; researchers can access historical technical manuals, pamphlets, exhibition catalogs, and photography books that show to development of photography from the 19th century to today. Photobooks as a distinct publication type – typically highlighting photographs with supplemental text as opposed to using photographs as illustration for the main text and with an emphasis on design elements – accelerated in production in the early 20th century with increased publication and distribution methods. Women photographers, and especially women of color, were not given the same access to publication as their male counterparts, and it is not until after secondwave feminism in the 1970s that we see a larger number of photobooks by women.
The examples currently on display through May 10, 2023, were all published in the 1930s and 1940s. These early photobooks show the wide range of photographic style and methods used by women photographers, from pictorialist in the early 1900s to photomontage, documentary style, and even action shots for dance photography. The photographers on display include:
- Berenice Abbott (1898-1991)
- Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971)
- Anne Brigman (1869-1950)
- Claude Cahun (1894-1954) and Marcel Moore (1892-1972)
- Dorothea Lange (1895-1965)
- Barbara Brooks Morgan (1900-1992)
Join Special Collections librarians on Wednesday May 10 from 12-2pm for a hands-on tour of the photobooks. Or visit the Special Collections reading room to work directly with UMBC’s photobook collection!