ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the various ways in which a range of social actors used the photograph in order to depict and perform labour. The photograph is one of the most intriguing forms of material culture from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries available to historians. For nearly a century, critics of photography and photographers themselves have struggled with the veracity of the technology – its possibilities as well as its complexities. The chapter makes clear varying priorities in the depiction of women's labour by the producers of the photographs following Pierre Bourdieu's conception of the 'social definition of photography'. It describes by speculating on what the photographs suggest about women's performance of themselves as labouring subjects. Depicting women's labour was a means of demonstrating the organisation's work as well as staking a claim for women's new roles in a modern society.
