I take umbrage at the level of research done by the person who wrote the Rose Hartman article. The feminist ’70s were full of female photographers, myself among them. Art schools of the time, and mine, the School of Visual Arts on 23rd Street in NYC included, did NOT consider photography to be a fine art, yet Linda McCartney, Annie Leibovitz, Roberta Bailey, Marcia Resnick, Laura Levine, Kate Simon, Jill Furmanovsky and Lynn Goldsmith were all out there in the field, recording their time as a hotbed of fun and new ideas. I was probably the only one who didn’t shoot parties (or clubs like Studio 54); I did stage-shots and portraits — dancers, musicians, poets. I was in Art Forum with “Einstein on the Beach,” the opera by Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson. My first job for Christopher Street magazine was, “Shoot William Burroughs.” I did “Patti Smith Wallpaper,” and The Police’s first interview photos for New York Rocker, Billy Idol for Sounds, in London, Talking Heads, John Cale on tour: you get “the picture.”
You would obviously know McCartney’s and Leibovitz’s photographs, but check out the other women above, and you will see they were equally prolific. Don’t say, “Rose Hartman was the first, and maybe the only female photographer of her time,” etc. That is just bogus.
Beate Nilsen