The comfort comes from knowing she wanted to be there.
Ever since its invention back in the 19th century, photography has been documenting life. At the same time, it focuses on inviting audiences to a rather subjective world, while trying to be taken seriously as an art form. Photography has always been considered a male-dominated profession, but luckily things are changing. Scholars, writers, bloggers, photography students, and enthusiasts have been giving due to the female pioneers of the field. Most of them were always standing and/or hiding in the shadows, oblivious to how much they could acclaim and accomplish. Arguably, the techniques, concepts, and thematic female photographers use differ from those of male photographers. At a time when most women were convinced that their place was in the kitchen and certainly not in the dark room, some were struggling to surpass their male counterparts and work towards gaining respect and recognition for their work.
Cynthia Elbaum (American photographer, 1966-1994) was of Russian descent but grew up in Ashfield, Massachusetts. She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before graduating from Smith College in 1989 with a major in Russian studies. She travelled frequently to the former Soviet Union, working as a freelance photojournalist. Elbaum studied Russian at the University of Moscow after graduating from Smith and also worked as a freelance photographer in Russia before returning to the States where she worked as a translator for a Time photographer and taught English to Russian refugees. Elbaum began her career as a photojournalist in 1992, after she witnessed dead bodies on a Moscow street following Boris Yeltsin's takeover of the Russian parliament. On assignment for Time magazine during the start of the first war in Chechnya, Cynthia was photographing in the streets of Grozny, the capital of the breakaway republic, when she was killed in a Russian bombing raid. She was decapitated during an air attack on a residential neighbourhood in the breakaway Chechen capital. She is the first journalist known to have been killed in that war. At least 23 other civilians were killed in the shelling. Elbaum was inspecting the damage from the third straight day of Russian air raids when a warplane fired a rocket into a crowd. Although her camera and the film from her last day were lost with her, more of Elbaum's images were found in her belongings when fellow journalists gathered her possessions to send back to her parents.
The Cynthia Ellen Elbaum Papers are held at Smith College and document Elbaum's career as a photojournalist, notably in Chechnya during the war with the Soviet Union. The collection consists primarily of biographical information, correspondence and documentation of photo exhibits compiled and curated, respectively, after her untimely death in 1994. Her name was written on the glass panels of the Freedom Forum Journalists Memorial at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Her work has been displayed on several occasions by her college since her death, and was also shown at a gallery in Moscow in 1997, hosted by the Glasnost Defence Foundation which advocates for the rights of journalists throughout Russia. The work the photojournalist left in her brief life is gritty, compelling and textured. Looking at her work, you can't help but wonder what she would have achieved had she not chosen to cover the Chechen/Russian war in Grozny. Elbaum was undoubtedly brave, and her work courageous and unapologetic. Her images mirror the truth she wanted people to witness and her desire to photograph the growing conflict while trying to document - not only what is universally human - but also the fierce pride that has marked the people of the Caucasus for generations.
She told me she thought she would be going back and forth for the rest of her life.
We will continue talking about female names that left their mark on photography and about contemporary female photographers who are still to emerge. There are a lot of female photographers out there deserving of praise and we can only hope to cover as many of them as we can. Please follow this space to find out more.
