International Women’s Day March, London, 1972
Author: Angela Phillips Year: 1972
This photograph of Griselda Pollock and Susie Addinell, taken at the 1972 International Women’s Day march was deliberately intimate. As a member of the Women’s Lobby and Women’s Report, (the publishing group that emerged from the Women’s Lobby), I was very much a participant photographer. These were friends of mine, we were all there for the same reason, but it was also my job to record events and it was important to me that I didn’t repeat the stereotypes that were in the process of being created by, mostly male, press photographers and journalists. I wanted the women in the photographs to appear as they did to me, not strident harridans, but relatable, approachable women having a good time while they changed the world.
I was 23 and had graduated from an almost entirely male cohort of photography students at the London College of Printing. We had never been encouraged to question the way images were created – merely to learn how to copy the techniques. Discovering feminism through my first consciousness-raising group, barely a year earlier, introduced me to ways of thinking which were entirely new to me. I started to understand how the way women were pictured helped to build our sense of who we were and, at the same time, to severely limit what we understood to be possible.
Press photographers used framing and focal length to distance themselves from their subjects as a means of mimicking the ritualised objectivity of news reporters. They may have been depicting murder and mayhem but they did so from a cool, strategic, distance. The objects and people they chose to depict may have been terrified, or merely animated, but the photographer could make meaning by selecting whichever expression appeared to illustrate his (usually his) “preferred reading”.
Using photography as a participant, not merely an observer, meant taking time to tell a different story. While there was room for pictures of anger and aggression, I was also keen to find ways of showing comradeship, solidarity and sisterhood. And I wanted to take pictures from inside the crowd, not only from the edge.