Zaida Ben-Yusuf

Zaida Ben-Yusuf (November 21, 1869 – September 27, 1933) was an American portrait photographer based in New York. She was known for her artistic portraits of wealthy, fashionable, and famous Americans during the turn of the 19th–20th century.

In 1901, The Ladies Home Journal featured her and six other photographers as "The Foremost Women Photographers in America". By 1881, her mother was living in Ramsgate and working as a governess,

Photography career

In 1896, Ben-Yusuf began to be known as a photographer. In April 1896, two of her pictures were reproduced in The Cosmopolitan Magazine, and another study was exhibited in London as part of an exhibition put on by The Linked Ring. During November 1898, Ben-Yusuf and Frances Benjamin Johnston held a two-woman show with their works at the Camera Club of New York.

In 1900, Ben-Yusuf corresponded with Johnston about an exhibition of American women photographers in Paris timed to coincide with the Universal Exposition. Ben-Yusuf had five portraits in the show, which traveled to Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Washington, D.C. In 1912, Sadakichi Hartmann wrote that Ben-Yusuf had given up photography, and was living in the South Sea Islands.

Goodyear suggested that gender discrimination might have led to Ben-Yusuf being forgotten, despite her significant contributions towards developing photography as a medium of artistic expression. Photographic history had tended to focus on male photographers such as Stieglitz, and less so on the female photographers, even though it was one of the few occupations considered a respectable career for a single woman in late 19th and early 20th century New York. Even in relatively progressive New York, where innovators in the arts, science, journalism and politics gathered, it was difficult for a single professional woman to support herself.

Another reason for Ben-Yusuf's obscurity was that she had not bequeathed a significant archive of her work to a single institution, making it difficult to pull together enough examples to give her career the appropriate historical assessment. Goodyear's exhibition at the Smithsonian acted as a showcase for Ben-Yusuf's work, re-establishing her as a key figure in fine art photographic history.