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When she stepped from a packet boat onto a San Francisco dock on April 18, 1906, 22-year-old Edith Irvine made a swift decision to change her travel plans. Instead of embarking on a world tour, she stayed in San Francisco to photograph the devastation from the earthquake that had just occurred. Realizing that photographers were suspect and not welcome among the ruins, Irvine found a baby carriage and stowed her glass-plate photographic equipment inside. Thus equipped, she was protected from armed guards dispatched by city officials to prevent photographers from gathering evidence of the destruction. She then wandered the burning city for three days, photographing what she saw.(1)
Irvine took her glass plates home, stored them away, and apparently forgot them as she became a school teacher and went on to live her life. Her nephew discovered the plates in Irvine's attic after she died in 1949, and he donated them to Brigham Young University.(2)
The purpose of this essay is to use Irvine's example to contribute to a feminist "text,"(3) an articulation of female lives to elaborate our understanding of how women relate and contribute to social-historical reality, especially when the woman is considered "deviant" because she is working and is stigmatized because she does not comply with what "other people in the society are doing."(4) As a young female photographer, Edith Irvine was both "deviant" and "stigmatized." In her later years she was also eccentric, suffered from alcoholism and drug abuse, and died a suicide,(5) and yet the telling of her story adds to a collective understanding of the variability of the lives of women at the turn of the century.(6)
The few photographic histories that have dealt with specific female photographers have described their subjects as idiosyncratic, rather than significant, transitional figures in women's history.(7) Irvine could also be dealt with as idiosyncratic, but the intent here is to place her life and contribution to photojournalism in context of the turn-of-the-century transition in women's professionalism. Irvine's work also provides insights into the photographer's role as interpreter of the culture from the point of view of gender, which Gover suggests, along with class, "affects women's pictorial interpretations of their world."(8) As Ohrn discovered when compiling the photographs by Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams...