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Matinee: 'A Feminist Lens: Joan Roth' Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

22 October 2022

Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?

So we're pleased to present the 471st in our series of Saturday matinees today: A Feminist Lens: Joan Roth.

This two-minute clip from Pamela French is an excerpt from the film A Feminist Lens: The Art & Activism of Photographer Joan Roth is a quick introduction to the portraitist and social documentarian.

It opens with the masked Roth photographing a New York protest over the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe on June 24. In a voice-over, she says, "The camera gave me greater purpose in life than just myself." It let her communicate not just to women, she says, but to the world.

And indeed she has.

In the 1970s she photographed homeless women living on the streets of New York and in 1983 she joined rescue missions airlifting Ethiopian Jews to Israel. Inspired by the photographs she took there, Roth traveled to Jewish communities all over the world photographing Jewish women.

In addition to her exhibitions, she has published Shopping Bag Ladies of New York (1982), Jewish Women: A World of Tradition and Change (1995) and The Jews of Ethiopia: Last Days of an Ancient Community (2005).

This is admittedly just a trailer but, whether you catch the full film itself or not, it's a welcome introduction to someone who knows how to use a camera for the benefit of others, allowing us "to see ourselves as the mirror to one another," as she eloquently puts it.


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