Curator's Tour and Book Signing: Zaida Ben-Yusuf: New York Portrait Photographer, June 22

Zaida Ben-Yusuf (1869–1933) was a leading New York portrait photographer who attracted to her studio the important writers, artists, politicians, and actors of the period. On Sunday, June 22, at 2:00 p.m., the National Portrait Gallery’s associate curator of photographs, Frank Goodyear, will give a tour of the NPG exhibition “Zaida Ben-Yusuf: New York Photographer.” After the tour, he will sign copies of the book that accompanies the exhibition. Meet at the exhibition's entrance on the 2nd floor; more information on the event is available here.

In this blog post, Goodyear discusses Ben Yusuf’s 1898 self-portrait that hangs in the exhibition:

One of the signature works in the new exhibition “Zaida Ben-Yusuf: New York Portrait Photographer” is an 1898 self-portrait. Although Ben-Yusuf was principally a commercial photographer who attracted to her studio the leading cultural and political figures of the day, the subject she photographed most often was herself. During her career, she created no less than ten self-portraits, each different from the other in terms of dress, pose, and mood. 

Turning the camera on herself provided an opportunity to experiment with both the art of portraiture and her own feminine persona. These self-portraits gave the British-born photographer—a young single woman recently settled in New York City—a much-needed identity, one that would lessen her sense of displacement and attract attention to her art.

Rendered in a narrow vertical format, this image is striking for the costume Ben-Yusuf wears and the pose she adopts. Both mark her as a bohemian woman. Unlike more conventional dresses of the period, Ben-Yusuf’s long gown is strikingly form-fitting. Her dark coat and hat are equally modern in fashion, and the manner in which she arranges her long necklace and holds her fur muff at her side suggests a desire to push forward—if not to break free from—stylistic traditions. This likeness makes clear how conscious Ben-Yusuf was of her public appearance and how deliberate she was in casting herself among those women who looked to transgress traditional boundaries of femininity.

Reviewers greeted her photographs with enthusiasm. In Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Notes, critic William Murray singled out this self-portrait for praise. It was Ben-Yusuf, though, as much as the portrait itself that prompted Murray to comment that the subject “appears before us scintillating with all the qualities of mind and person represented by the much abused French word—chic.”

Twenty-eight years old when this portrait was created, Ben-Yusuf was indeed coming into her own as an independent woman and a fine art photographer. This self-portrait acts to announce her arrival in the New York art world and anticipates her engagement with the many subjects who would visit her studio in the years ahead.

- Frank Goodyear III

For more on Zaida Ben-Yusuf visit the online exhibition, and read about the research and genealogical detective work that went into creating the exhibition, in a previous blog post "Curator’s Journal: Frank Goodyear on Zaida Ben-Yusuf."

Portrait of Miss Ben-Yusuf/Zaida Ben-Yusuf, 1898/Platinum print/National Museum of American History, Behring Center, Smithsonian Institution