Julia Herschel, "Part of an old sampler of Roman lace," 1869. Cyanotype from A Handbook for Greek and Roman Lacemaking. London, 1869. New York Public Library, Spencer Collection.

Enmeshed: Photography, Lace, and Women’s Labor

Beth Saunders
(University of Maryland, Baltimore County)

In her 2012 series Leisure Work, Lisa Oppenheim’s large-scale photograms of antique lace invoke early contact prints by William Henry Fox Talbot used to promote his positive-negative photographic process. Her feminist reappraisal of this prominent motif unravels the interwoven histories of photography and lacemaking to expose the effacement of women’s labor in those realms. Focusing on Julia Herschel’s A Handbook for Greek and Roman Lace Making (1869; second edition 1870), illustrated with tipped-in cyanotype photograms of lace, I examine the social and economic forces embedded in this understudied Victorian photobook. Variations in collation, as well as in color, trimming, and captioning of prints across extant copies of the book reveal the moralistic and gendered discourses surrounding handmade versus industrial lacemaking in mid-nineteenth century England. Weaving together Oppenheim’s work with Herschel’s reveals how these inherent tensions mirror those found in early writings on photography, and exposes the extent to which the conceptualization of photography as a medium has been imbricated in the repression of female labor.

Beth Saunders is the Curator and Head of Special Collections and Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She holds a PhD and MPhil in Art History from The CUNY Graduate Center and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A specialist in the history of photography, Beth’s writing has appeared in edited volumes, exhibition catalogues, and journals including CAA.Reviews, History of Photography, Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, Exposure, Photography and Culture, and Rivista di Studi di Fotografia. She is co-author of the exhibition catalogue Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography (The Met, 2019.)