Last June in a midtown rehearsal studio, amid dancers and singers warming up, the board of PWP convened for its final meeting of the year. I was new and when someone said archives, I raised my hand. Old books and pictures are passions for me. I didn’t know much about PWP and it seemed a great place to start.

But when I got over to the archives, I had second thoughts. They are in a storage facility on the west side of Chelsea, on a block with auto body shops and rough-looking folk. The building was cavernous, with green lockers reminiscent of a morgue, an elevator the size of a living room, and lights on a timer that liked to go off. It was creepy. I grabbed some stuff and ran.

Back home I examined my treasure. There were pictures of women marching in the street and showing photographs from the back of a truck. Who were they? What were they doing?

There were also announcements from shows in the 70′s and 80′s: Breadth of Vision, The Me Generation, Women of Vision. The pictures were black and white and grainy, the graphics from the early days of desktop publishing. The time wasn’t so long ago, yet everything seemed different and far away. I didn’t know what to make of it.

Slowly it dawned on me that I was looking at a slice of history. Not ancient history but recent history. There was the history of PWP itself, starting with the Breadth of Vision show at FIT in 1975. There was also the history of photography as it moved from film into the digital age, and above all there was the history of women from the 70′s on: women standing up, women speaking out, women marching and fighting for employment opportunities and rights that had long been denied.

Today we take so much for granted. We forget that chances weren’t always there. In the 1950′s my mom was an ad manager for the American Weekly, the supplement of Hearst’s New York Journal American. It was a Don Draper world and office politics were played with a gender slant. I heard over and over how men tried to put her down, cut her out, steal her work; how women had to fight twice as hard to be recognized and get ahead.

Mom got ahead and the world moved forward too. Over half of all workers now are women, and there are more women photographers than ever, represented in publications, museums and galleries around the world. But if the opportunities today seem unlimited, the fight to secure them was uncertain and hard.

Looking at these pictures and talking with some of the early women of PWP, I realized they were feisty and tough. They stood up for what they believed in, worked with what they had and took small steps. They organized and supported each other because no one else would. They found obstacles and no clear road. So they made one by walking.

In this blog I want to pay tribute to them. I want to look back at the paths they blazed and the issues they dealt with. They have lessons for all of us, and inspiration too. We have come a long, long way as photographers and women, but the road stretches on, the journey isn’t through.

- Catherine Kirkpartrick, Archives Chair