Lady Clementina Hawarden was a nineteenth century photographer who made exquisite portraits of her daughters. Her work was celebrated at the time, but when her granddaughter visited the V & A’s centennial celebration of photography in 1939, she was shocked to find none of Clementina’s work on display. She went on to donate nearly 800 of her photographs to the museum.

These photographs had been stuck into albums, collected by the family in an informal archive. They were torn or cut from the pages, and the corners are missing.

With this series of chemigrams I am repurposing my own archive, tearing up photographs and layering them in the darkroom. I am thinking about how few women are in the archive and what this means for the practice of photography today, when only 15% of professional photographers are women, and they make on average 40% less than men.