37. The Acton Photograph Archive: Between Representation and Re-Interpretation

Photographer Alessandra Capodacqua’s ‘The Acton Photograph Archive: Between Representation and Re-Interpretation’ mines a unique photography collection by selecting portraits of women that align with the standards of mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century portraiture whereby women were represented as symbols of beauty and purity. She focuses on the gaze of these women, arguing that it conveys different messages because their expressions could not be controlled by the photographer as they could by a painter, for instance.