French photographer Janine Niépce was one of the country’s first female photojournalists. A new exhibition of her photos, some of which are being shown for the first time, looks at the rise of the working woman against the backdrop of the women’s rights movement in the second half of the twentieth century.
When the female photographer Janine Niépce first turned up at the factory floor in the early 1950s to take photos of the workers, they were quick to ask for “Mr Niépce, the photographer”.
Assuming the shoot had been booked by the male photographer’s wife, they were astonished when a woman appeared to take the photographs. But Niépce simply took it in her stride and explained she was the photographer herself.
When questioned about the weight of her cameras and equipment, she replied that her camera was “no heavier than a baby”.
Niépce, born in 1921 to a family of Burgundy winegrowers – and a distant relative of photography’s founding father, Nicéphore Niépce – never set out to focus exclusively on women. Indeed, she photographed men at work as often as she did women.
But by dint of being a woman herself, Niépce so often came up against injustices – that women couldn’t vote, that they needed a man’s approval to open a bank account, the lack of access to contraception and the right to abortion – that women’s rights and women’s lives began to shape her work.
“I think she built her life as a photographer around what she observed, what she saw, and what also shocked her in a way,” said her grand-daughter Hélène Jaeger Defaix, at the opening of the exhibition: ‘Janine Niépce: a look at women and work’.
Niépce “documented whatever interested her”, said Jaeger Defaix, be it the lives of young students, factory workers, rural dwellers, women’s rights, adding that she documented every aspect of women’s lives, whatever their background.
After studying history of art at the Sorbonne in occupied Paris while developing films for the Resistance, Niépce started out by photographing her aunts, her contemporaries and neighbours.
Pioneering female photojournalism in France, she went on to snap female factory workers, farming communities, young scientists and student protests, and to document scenes from the women’s rights movement as it gathered in momentum.
Never happier than taking photos in the thick of a crowd, she captured factory workers holding aloft banners as they gathered to protest for equal pay, nurses on strike marching through Paris and a young woman holding the contraceptive pill in her hand. A sense of joy and progress runs like a thread throughout her work.
“She didn't want to show the shocking stuff, but the stuff you can bounce back from and move towards. That was always her way of seeing things,” said Jaeger Defaix.
She snapped pregnant women working on building sites and women lining up to vote in the 1950s.
Incensed that women were allowed to join the Resistance and die for France and yet not allowed to vote, Niépce described the day – April 21, 1944 – that French women were given the vote as “one of the happiest days of her life”.
When contraception was legalised in 1967 and the Veil Law decriminalising abortion was enacted in 1975, women were free to plan their lives and move into jobs that were previously considered off-limits.
‘Portraits of everyday life’
Yet alongside her photographs of the women’s rights movement, Niépce also documented women’s daily lives – doing the laundry, loading the dishwasher, dressing children for school, serving soup – activities that she considered to be “work” even if they were unacknowledged and unpaid. And in this way, she recognised women’s status as workers in their own right.
Her fellow “humanist” photographers – Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis and Henri Cartier-Bresson – didn’t consider everyday women’s life to be a “real subject”, said Jaeger Defaix.
Doisneau and Cartier-Bresson usually photographed “beautiful women, haute couture models … but rarely women doing laundry”, Niépce observed.
She noticed that if a male photographer came into the room the women tended to brush their hair a little or tried to look a little better, her grand-daughter recalled.
But Niépce, once arriving on a factory floor or a building site, set about making herself as unobtrusive and discreet as possible, snapping her subjects without makeup, and without staging her photos – giving her pictures an intimacy, a naturalness and a spontaneity.
One of the “great strengths” of Janine’s work, Jaeger Defaix explained, was not only that she photographed all kinds of women, but that her photos make you look at what the women are doing, rather than how they look.
“We see women: young women, old women. Small ones. Fat. Ugly women. We don’t look at how they look, that’s not the point of them. It's what they do for a living, the action they're doing,” said her grand-daughter.
“And that's what's still shocking today,” she continued. “When a female politician speaks out, people immediately comment on her hair or her outfit.
“But when [Janine] photographs the Polytechnic women [female engineering students] getting ready for the 14 July parade, we don't ask ourselves whether it's pretty or not. You just think, ‘There, that's nice. There are women.' And the same goes for scientists," she said.
For as women moved out of their traditional roles as caregivers into jobs that had previously been off limits, Niépce wanted to inspire them to pursue less conventional careers.
She snapped women in management positions, forewomen, engineers, young chemistry students and engineers, dentists and doctors.
She photographed female architects and pilots, researchers and oncologists, hoping to open up possibilities for young women and highlight roles that they might have dismissed as usually reserved for men.
Niépce, who signed with the Rapho agency in 1965, and lived from her photography, “always saw work as a means of emancipation, of freedom – of not depending on anyone, especially not a man or a husband, or a father or brother”, Jaeger Defaix explained.
“I would like these images, which bear witness to fifty years of struggle, to encourage young girls to be vigilant,” said Niépce of her photographs, before her death in 2007 at the age of 86.
This small but powerful collection of photographs acts as a warning of hard-won women’s rights while paying fitting tribute to the women who fought so hard to obtain them.
‘Janine Niépce, regard sur les femmes et le travail’ runs at La Cité de l’Économie in Paris's 17th arrondissement (district) until January 5, 2025.
