ABSTRACT
Summarising the relationship of feminism and photography presents a significant challenge since the relationship between a political and social movement and the study of a visual medium is not a straightforward one. Photography and art are viewed as antinomies, the term photographer detracting from the ability of the artist to transcend the machine of the camera and thus achieve full human agency and subjectivity. This indicates that photographers are largely of low status, bound by pre-given aesthetic and commercial codes and adhering to a primarily institutionalised and instrumental ethos. The realism of photography seems, therefore, to justify the essentialist assumptions of masculine forms of masculine knowledge. The institutionalised difference at the level of consumption between taking and making so essential to the distinction between the identity of on the one hand the snapshooter and, on the other, the serious amateur. The culture of the snapshooter is entirely different from that of the typically male serious amateur.
