The Woman in the Photograph

by Stephanie Butland

  Veronica Moon, Women in Photographs (unpublished)

  ‘Alison as Beverly in Abigail’s Party’

  Veronica Moon

  Exhibition Section: Portrait Power

  Camera: OM-1

  Film: 400 ASA

  First published: This Month, 1977

  [Technical note: Moon switched to using an Olympus OM-1 camera in 1976. It is smaller and lighter, but has many of the same technical specifications as her previous Nikon F1. Although newer models did come out in subsequent years, Moon never upgraded again.]

  If you’ve seen a photographic portrait of an important female figure of the 1970s, there’s a good chance Veronica Moon took it. She was one of the most active and in-demand British photographers of the late 1970s and early 1980s. This is the section of the exhibition where you’ll see her really hitting her stride. She was part of the movement taking photography to a more naturalistic style: you can look at the work of Antony Armstrong-Jones (later Lord Snowdon) and Annie Liebovitz for photographers pioneering a similar approach.

  This portrait of Alison Steadman in her role as Beverly in Mike Leigh’s play Abigail’s Party was Moon’s first cover shot, taken for the May 1977 issue of British magazine This Month, which ran from 1962 to 1986. Leonie Barratt, who introduced Moon’s work to the magazine, wrote her famous ‘Dear John’ column for it from 1966 to 1981.

  Alongside this portrait you’ll see the magazine in which the Steadman profile appeared, and Moon’s ticket to the press night, as well as the contact sheet from which this photograph was selected. Note how Moon has taken very few shots in which Steadman is looking at the camera.

  Moon took this photograph at the first night of Abigail’s Party at the Hampstead Theatre in April 1977. She photographs Steadman next to the stage door. The actor’s face is in profile, head tilting slightly downward, face calm and still – the opposite of the character she plays. There’s a smudge of makeup under one eye and she has let down her hair. The twilight lends a slightly flattened quality to the image, and the brickwork behind the actor makes the calmness and clearness of her face seem almost eerie. This is a good example of what was by then Moon’s signature style: unguarded, subject seemingly unaware of the camera, natural light doing most of the work.

  You’ll find a selection of her portraits in this section of the exhibition. Some are photographs commissioned by national newspapers and magazines. Others are from private collections – Moon often photographed friends and fellow members of the women’s groups to which she belonged. She also took portraits of well-known activists and feminists, which they used as publicity shots.

  Moon was sometimes criticised because she also photographed women who did not identify as feminists, and men. As the women’s movement has broadened in scope, the idea of men being automatically excluded from identifying as feminists seems arcane; however, in the 1970s, men were often perceived by feminists as enemy figures who couldn’t possibly understand what women were up against. Men were, by definition, part of the problem.

  In 1977:

  • It was a year since Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum set up the Women’s Therapy Centre in London

  • It was a year since the Domestic Violence and Matrimonial Proceedings Act enabled married women to obtain a court order against violent husbands, independently of divorce or separation proceedings. (The first recorded use of the term ‘domestic violence’ in the context of the home was in 1973 in an address to Parliament by Jack Ashley, MP.)

  • It was four years since Virago Press, committed to publishing women’s writing and books on feminism, was founded

  • The Women’s Room by Marilyn French was published

  • The United Nations formalised International Women’s Day

  • The first Star Wars film was released

  • Saturday Night Fever was a box office hit

  • Fleetwood Mac’s album Rumours was a global hit

  • Greenpeace UK was founded, in a borrowed office in London, with four members and £800

  • The first series of TV’s Top Gear, presented by Angela Rippon and Tom Coyne, aired in the UK

  • Edinburgh women held the first ‘Reclaim the Night’ march in Britain

  • The Women’s Liberation Movement held a national conference in London, where Sheila Jeffreys presented a paper called ‘The Need for Revolutionary Feminism’

  And, in a Chelsea flat, Veronica Moon and Leonie Barratt are having a difficult time.

  15 April 1977

  Chelsea

  Vee is transferring the last of her London Street Project films from the safety of their black plastic cylinders to the safety of the developing tank. It’s the trickiest part of the developing process, because if a film is flooded with light now then whatever carefully exposed image is on it is gone forever. If light gets in later, then it’s a print that’s ruined, and though it’s a pain to develop another, it’s possible. But open the darkroom door when the film is being transferred and there is absolutely nothing to be done to save it. You are exposing a light-sensitive material to more light. You are bludgeoning it. Vee finds that she is holding her breath. She is working via the eerie red glow of the darkroom bulb.

  There are five films, thirty-six frames on each: one hundred and eighty images altogether, and a year’s work.

  Once the transfer is done, she will add the developer, look at the negatives, and develop the first round of prints, maybe twenty or so from throughout the sequence, to see what’s there, what the theme of this work might be. It’s exciting. And now that most of her films are developed by newspaper and magazine labs, it’s good to get back to basics in the darkroom like this. There’s nothing quite like the thrill of being the first person to see what you took, and whether it matches up with the shots you think you have.

  This project had all come about because of a late-night conversation with Leonie and Bea, when they’d been talking about how the world was, or wasn’t, changing. Neither Leonie nor Bea were sanguine. They were worried about schisms in the sisterhood, and in the never-ending impossibility of getting the patriarchy to stay dismantled, when they did manage change.

  But Vee felt – feels – differently. She sees herself as an example of change as it’s happening – a woman in a man’s world, and she might not exactly be accepted in all quarters, but she’s here. Vee looks back at that year at the Colchester Echo now and can’t believe what she put up with.

  Look at her now. Look at the world.

  Women are rising up. They are shouting for equality – real equality, no more being underpaid or struggling into ridiculous clothes or feeling as though getting married is anything other than an outdated patriarchal notion that nobody needs. Equality, true equality is coming. It’s in the legislation, it’s in the literature, it’s in Spare Rib and the flares and ponchos that feel like freedom. It’s in the air at the Women’s Liberation Front meetings, where more and more sisters come, with more and more stories of what they are protesting, what they are refusing to put up with. It’s thrilling, and too many people are missing it.

  Leonie and Bea had been sceptical of her view. They still see Vee as a junior, beginner feminist, a little sister. Vee had cited the Sex Discrimination Act and the Equal Opportunities Commission, but Leonie and Bea had looked at each other, smiled, and then explained, rather too patiently, that it wasn’t enough; that it might even stop the sisters from rising up the way they should because they think equal rights for women is all taken care of.

  But Vee had known she is better qualified because she’s closer to reality than her privately educated, clever friends. So she had set out to change their perspective with photographs. And the more photographs she took, the more she stopped thinking about making an argument against what Leonie and Bea thought. They would always run rings around her, intellectually. But she could show what she meant. She could track change, show the broadness of women’s lives, the scope of them, their power.

  Since then, whenever she’s had a spare
daylight hour, she has stopped women in the streets near their flat. There are always people passing: workers in a rush in the mornings, pram-pushers, afternoon drinkers, evening strollers. After her first afternoon of loitering, nervously and indecisively, Vee made a rule that she would stop the first woman she saw. Otherwise she’d only have photographs of the approachable-looking, the friendly, and she may as well not bother. Most have agreed to being photographed when she has promised to take no more than five minutes. Vee has not given any of them time to tidy their hair, put fresh lipstick on.

  She had a feeling there might be an exhibition in it, eventually: a year in the life. This morning she is taking a first look, thanks to a shoot being delayed: Fleetwood Mac are flying in from the US a day later than planned, so she can’t photograph Stevie Nicks until tomorrow. Stevie Nicks! Vee still can’t get over the fact that she is the photographer on these shoots – but this unexpected darkroom time is exciting, too. So exciting that she forgot to lock the door from the inside.

  She’s about to put the lid on the developing tank, and exhale, when the door doesn’t so much open, as crash through its maximum arc, bouncing off the wall behind.

  Vee crams the lid on the developing tank but she knows it’s too late.

  ‘NO!’ she shouts, as though sheer volume will wind back the light, unruin her work. If she was melodramatic she would sink to her knees. She isn’t. She takes a step towards the man in the doorway. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? You’ve just ruined a year of my work, you bloody idiot.’

  ‘I’m bursting for a piss,’ the man says. He’s clearly just woken up; he’s disorientated, still drunk, maybe. He’s wearing Leonie’s red dressing gown, though Vee isn’t sure why he bothered to put it on, because it’s not fastened. He smiles; it’s probably meant to be charming, ‘I’ll just do that and then – and then I’ll come and help you.’ He looks around, blinks, in the hope, presumably, of seeing the damage he has clearly done. ‘I’ll come and help you . . . fix it. What I broke.’

  ‘You cannot,’ Veronica says, ‘wind back the light.’ And she looks away because she truly has never had a genuinely violent thought until now, when she could, happily, throw whatever liquid comes to hand at his crotch and hope to see his pathetic cock shrivel up and drop off. Not that anything in the darkroom is especially caustic. But for a second she wishes it was.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the man says.

  ‘That doesn’t help.’ Vee leans a shoulder against the door, presses the space between her eyes with the pad of her thumb. ‘There’s nothing you can do. Get out.’ She cannot bear to look at him, his unshaven face and smell of sweat and garlic, his hairy paunch and bony knees – he has, at least, pulled the dressing gown around him, maybe sensing her intent to do him damage.

  He walks backwards from the room, looking aggrieved, just as Leonie emerges from her bedroom, sleep-faced and confused. Vee slams the darkroom door, locking it behind her this time. It’s a futile gesture but it feels good, and it means that no one can interrupt her with apologies or offers of help.

  Of course, she should have locked the damn thing anyway. But Leonie rarely surfaces before eleven. Lesson learned.

  18 April 1977

  ‘ARE YOU STILL SULKING?’ Leonie asks as she lumbers into the kitchen, where Vee is washing up. She may be being unnecessarily clattering about it, banging crockery onto the draining board. Maybe she is half-hoping something will break, to give her something else to be annoyed about.

  ‘I’m not sulking. I’m angry. And we need clean plates.’ She thinks about turning to face her flatmate, but instead she starts to blot at the water that pools on the Formica of the worktop between the wall and the back of the sink, and adds, ‘I think I’m entitled to be annoyed that months of work was ruined. You went mad at me that one time I forgot my key.’

  ‘It was 2 a.m. You ruined my flow.’

  ‘And you got it back. I won’t get those photographs back.’

  ‘It’s not like you needed them. They weren’t for anything.’

  Vee takes a deep breath, but it’s not really to calm herself down, it’s to fuel her fury. She had hung about in the darkroom until she was sure the idiot man had gone, then taken a bath, then gone out with her camera for the rest of the day. She missed her Nikon’s familiarity for a long time, but the OM-1 feels as though it’s really right for her, a good fit in her hands, and so light that carrying a spare over her shoulder is barely noticeable. She’d intended to start photographing women again, but her heart wasn’t in it. And the more she thought about what she’d lost the angrier, the sadder, she got. An essential part of living with Leonie has always been to let her selfishness flow over and round Vee, like water, like wind. But this, Vee can’t let go. ‘They were for me. They were my work. I don’t belittle your writing, even though—’

  ‘Even though . . . ?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She could say, ‘Even though most of what you write is rejected’, but that wouldn’t be fair. Especially as Vee’s success is due, in a great part, to either taking up the early introductions Leonie made, or adopting her approach, by simply asking for the jobs she wants.

  Not long after Vee moved in to the Chelsea flat, Leonie sat her down with a pile of newspapers and said, ‘Read. Make a list of female journos and a list of people you’d like to photograph. Write to the journos. Ring up the newsdesks. Tell them if they’re going to do a piece on people you’re interested in, you’d like to photograph them.’

  ‘Will that work?’

  Leonie had shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s worth a try, though, isn’t it? I think Germaine Greer’s got something else coming out. Start by saying you could photograph her.’

  ‘Yes,’ Vee said, ‘I could do that, couldn’t I?’ As her dad says: you don’t ask, you don’t get.

  ‘You could,’ Leonie says, and then adds, ‘Why don’t you send’ – she pauses for a minute while she thinks – ‘I don’t know what you call them. When you make a sheet with all the images on the film, in rows? With the edges of the negatives showing?’

  ‘Contact sheets?’

  ‘Contact sheets.’ Leonie grins. She’s always been fascinated by them, ever since Vee sent her that first one, the week after they met at Dagenham. ‘That’s got to be more interesting.’

  And Vee had done just that. It had been cheap, too – she had contact sheets already, and it showed her technique and range better than a single photograph did. After all, anyone can get lucky with one good shot. A contact sheet shows the way your photographer’s eye works, what your camera noses out about your subject. Within three weeks she had her first commission, thanks to Eve Pollard, a journalist Leonie knew at the Daily Mirror, putting a word in for her. By the time April 1971 came she was doing a shoot a week. It wasn’t a lot but it was more than nothing. She spent a long summer schlepping out to Essex at the weekends to photograph weddings, but it meant she could see her dad regularly. By September, she had decided to take no more bookings for portraits, weddings, or family photographs: she was a press photographer. Her savings paid her bills; her earnings paid for living, and travelling, and – after a year when the commissions were coming faster – a new camera, lenses, and a proper bag to go with them. She had started to feel like a real photographer at last.

  Vee knows she owes Leonie a lot. And she feels bad, watching her struggle for exposure for her writing, for an audience. The monthly column was meant to be a starting point, but it’s all Leonie has. Vee cannot imagine why. Plus, there was the abortion. Leonie insists that an abortion is – should be – nothing, but Vee isn’t so sure.

  So Vee has done her best to be helpful, patient, sympathetic, within the bounds of what Leonie will allow. But that doesn’t mean she can’t stand up for herself when she needs to. And it doesn’t mean that she can’t be hurt, furious, in her turn.

  Leonie sits down at the kitchen table. Without turning round, Vee can visualise the movements that go with the sounds: the scrape of the chair pulled out,
the thump of sitting down, the sigh. ‘They weren’t that important, though, were they? I mean, the brilliant Veronica Moon doesn’t develop her own photos these days, does she?’

  Breathe, Vee, don’t take the bait. ‘Just because the photographs I develop here are non-commissioned, it doesn’t mean they don’t matter. You of all people should know that.’

  Leonie makes a half grunt of agreement. Her continuing failure to get her more radical work published has worn her down. Though she doesn’t see it a failure of her own, but of the establishment, and Vee thinks she is probably right. She reads everything Leonie writes, before she sends it off to wherever it’s going. She rarely makes suggestions. She mostly admires. But she does it sincerely. And she knows that’s what Leonie wants. Not as an ego trip – just confirmation that her words work. They call it the Doolittle test. Vee doesn’t mind. Sometimes her test for photographs is, ‘Would Barry recognise this subject if he saw this shot?’

  The sink cannot be any cleaner. And it’s too tiring to keep this argument going, because what’s done is done. It’s seven years – longer than some marriages – since she moved in and they know how arguments end. Leonie never backs down. So Vee changes the subject.

  She turns and smiles, pulls out the chair opposite Leonie’s. ‘Who was he, anyway?’

  ‘Who?’ Something else Vee has learned: Leonie is not graceful in victory.

  ‘The idiot who opened the darkroom door.’

  Leonie shrugs. ‘Paul. I met him at Fen’s last year. You missed it, because you were selling your soul to the patriarchy, again.’

  Ignore, ignore. ‘I think I was photographing David Steel.’

  ‘Like I said.’

  Oh, for crying out loud. ‘He’s the new leader of the Liberal Party and he got the Abortion Act through Parliament. He’s hardly Hugh Hefner.’