Women Looking at Women Looking at Women: Reclaiming Histories of Women in the Arts and Proposing Models to Facilitate Future Friendships / Annemarie Wadlow

The booklet Women Looking at Women by Annemarie Wadlow examines the ways women artists come together to collectively investigate their own image. It delves into various histories of feminist collective art practice and focuses on how women claim agency of their image through collaborations which connect intergenerational and long-distance friendships. Wadlow examines four visual case studies: L'atelier des femmes peintres (1833) by Phillippe-Jacques van Bree, Photographers at the Ovular (1980) by Joan E. Biren, Carmen Winant’s photobook Notes on Fundamental Joy (2019), and the poetic essay Women as Columns of Pillars (2019) by Josephine Mead.

"This elegant, engaging book represents what the jury believe to be an important voice within the field: that of small self-publishing initiatives which, working with small budgets, often are nonetheless able to create unique, experimental publications. This publication, a collaboration between a number of female designers, certainly makes a unique impression. The fragile, translucent paper reinforces the idea of collaboration that is so inherent to the DNA of this project: not a single page works only by itself. An idea that is also reflected in the marvellous self cover. The typography of the book is full of little visual jokes and experiments, such as a text about ‘pillars’ in which the text is partly laid out in the shape of a Greek temple. Almost too much, but not quite. All in all, Women Looking… is well thought-out and well made, from the quality printing to the colour of the thread with which it is bound, which corresponds to the special colour used to print the texts. Another attractive aspect of this book for the jury is that it is published as part of the inaugural Page Not Found Thesis Award, an initiative by this platform to promote ‘publishing as artistic practice’."