To celebrate this year’s International Women’s Day, we put together a list of 16 female photographers whose drive and dedication to their work not only inspires us today, but all year round. These photographers passionately work across different genres the world over, some creating projects that directly address misogyny and oppression, and others dedicating their craft to darkroom experimentation that taps into entirely different dimensions.
We’ve had the pleasure of interviewing a number of inspiring women over the past year, and below you’ll find links to some of our favorite features, as well as each artist’s website. While International Women’s Day offers a reason to pause and highlight the work of these female artists, let’s make a point of celebrating these incredible individuals as photographers—who also happen to be women.
—The Editors of LensCulture
By clicking on each photographer’s name, you will be taken to their personal website. Links to our articles and interviews with each artist can be found below their project description.
Ana Samoylova
By analyzing deceptive images of fantastical environments, artist Ana Samoylova questions how much we actually know about our own surroundings and natural landscapes.
Read the Interview: Manufactured Beauty and Default Photographs
This artist’s lifelong fascination with luminous color sparked her resolve to put the camera aside, instead using her photographic materials to capture pure representations of light and synaesthesia.
Read the Interview: Chasing Light Through Color: A Conversation with Liz Nieslen
Pixy Liao started using her boyfriend as a “prop” in her photos, but that evolved into an ongoing 12-year project documenting their unconventional relationship, resulting in some eye-opening images.
Read the Interview: Experimental Relationship
Lois Cohen & Indiana Roma Voss
Photographer Lois Cohen and stylist Indiana Roma Voss reimagine female archetypes from across history as new, empowered icons for the 21st-century woman.
Read the Feature: Metamorphosis
While sifting through the archive of her life’s work, this photographer found herself stitching together the commonalities between quiet, personal images and recognizably famous faces.
Read the Interview: Politics in Portraiture: A Conversation with Emily Andersen
From intelligent surveillance technology to figuring out the best route for our day, Esther Hovers forges new visual languages to investigate how our movements through public space are shaped and structured by hidden forces.
Read the Interview: Beyond the Visible: Hidden Structures of the Street
In this make-shift quasi-legal settlement on the fringes of Bogota, 270 families can be seen as a microcosm of the country’s complicated story: victims of Colombia’s armed conflict, ex-guerrilla members, single mothers, indigenous and afro communities and economically-displaced families.
Read the Feature: Entre Nubes
In Rie Yamada’s absurd investigation into the family album, the photographer restages family portraits, putting herself in every role.
Read the Interview: Familie Werden
Rejecting offensive stereotypes related to piracy and terrorism, this project collaborates with the people of Somaliland to show off their vibrant visual culture, fashion and architecture.
Read the Interview: The Anarchist Citizenship
Enter the close-knit sisterhood of the Jane Austen Pineapple Appreciation Society—a group bringing the past alive in the present.
Read the Interview: Where We Belong
By combining photography with intricate drawings from her personal sketchbook, artist Sara S. Teigen creates intimate work that is simultaneously wondrous and familiar.
Read the Interview: Mapping an Interior Landscape
Brazilian artist Alice Quaresma works with photographs, collage, paint and other materials to create serious art imbued with subversive playfulness.
Read the Interview: Alibi
Hiking for months on end through a remote archipelago in Finland, artist Anna Reivilä uses Japanese bonding techniques to create striking land art.
Read the Interview: Bond
Documenting her exploration of the body in relation to memory and space, artist Patricia Voulgaris creates magnetic photographs that invite her viewer to contemplate their own physical presence in relation to their surroundings.
Read the Interview: Fragmented Bodies and Disjointed Space
What does it mean to be a beautiful woman? In this book, photographer Natalie Krick plays with the viewer’s expectations and preconceptions about imagery of sensual women.
Read the feature and book review here: Natural Deceptions: Disorienting and Deceiving Portraits of Womanhood
Like a forensic investigator, Alba Zari methodically started to look for traces of her unknown biological father by using software, real family photos, and a process of elimination, to imagine what he must look like.
Read the Feature: The Y
