How Feminist Photography of the 1970s Paved the Way for Women Artists Today

I came across this article on "How Feminist Photography of the 1970s Paved the Way for Women Artists Today," written for a show (Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s) that just opened at The Photographers' Gallery in London.  The show consists of over 150 works made by 48 international female artists all on loan from the Verbund Collection in Vienna.

Many women artists today have looked to the artists that were working in “the decade of radical feminism” (Valie Export, Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman) for inspiration in their works on similar issues in society today – bringing up the "oh, that's been done before" idea about art making, this time in the realm of feminist photography.  Many of the issues that women were fighting for back then are still being fought for now, for example: 

“Many of the things women were fighting for in the 1970s—equal pay, the right to be safe, to have access to free sexual health care, to abortion—are sadly still far from resolved. There are additional enemies today, too, which are less visible and more insidious, such as censorship and social media algorithms.”

The author makes an excellent point that “these pictures [70s feminist photography] cannot be looked at as a sealed-off archive, or completed works that need not be built upon.  Things have been done before, but they still need to be done now.”  These issues are still prevalent in society and are reflected in the art community today.  This article was an interesting read because it forced me to “explore the past” by researching radical feminist art of the 70s and “examine the present” to see how these issues have been resolved – or not – over the past several decades.