Makers · Femdom Art

Makers

Conventions do not appear on their own. They are the residue of working people hitting deadlines: illustrators paid by the page, photographers on a magazine contract, directors with a schedule. These pages stick to the public professional record. Where the value of a body of work is disputed, the dispute is printed rather than settled.

Photographers

The studio names whose lighting and framing became the genre default.

1950s to 2004

Helmut Newton: the commanding woman as a fashion assignment

Helmut Newton photography put tall, self-possessed women at the centre of magazine fashion for forty years. The vocabulary he built, and the argument left.

Directors

Filmmakers who put dominant women on screen and were taken seriously for it.

1970s to present

Women directing and shooting the genre: where the camera stands

Women filmmakers femme fatale: what changes when the person making the image is a woman, and why the record of who did this work is thinner than it should be.

Illustrators

The pen-and-ink hands behind the magazine era and what came after.

1940s to 1999

Eric Stanton: the line that built the towering woman

Eric Stanton illustrator work for the mail-order magazines fixed a physical type: heavy line, real musculature, and a woman who owns the top of the frame.

1950s to 1974

Gene Bilbrew: the illustrator who signed himself Eneg

Gene Bilbrew Eneg: a flatter, more graphic answer to the same mid-century magazine brief as Stanton, from one of very few Black illustrators in the field.

Credited, uncredited, and paid by the page

Behind every name on this list are the models, correspondents and collaborators who supplied the material and got no line in the colophon.

See where it happens now

Somebody drew it, somebody lit it