'Images that don't, in general, exist': Format Photographers Agency and the politics of representation in print

Format Photographers Agency (1983–2003) was a groundbreaking woman-only enterprise initiated by Maggie Murray and Val Wilmer, in response to the isolation that they and their fellow photographers faced working in the male-dominated industry of British photojournalism. But Format’s ambitions went well beyond challenging the structural inequalities of professional photography and print media: in tandem with many feminists, its members aspired to nothing less than a radical overhaul of photographic representation. Format’s history reveals how image-makers played a key role in the feminist publishing initiatives that emerged within the context of the women’s liberation movement in Britain, constituting an illuminating example of what the feminist historian Lucy Delap has termed ‘feminist business praxis’, whereby organisations sought to combine commercial success with political change. Format’s ‘feminist business praxis’ resulted in an agency geared towards, in the words of the photographer Pam Isherwood, the creation of ‘images that don’t, in general, exist,’ as they sought to transform the representation of women across a range of publications, from the grassroots to the mainstream press. This chapter identifies three core forms of image-making that Format developed through the generation of photographs and their subsequent placement and circulation in print: situated, campaigning and communal. Focusing on the initial years (1983–89) when Format operated as a co-operative, it maps these types of photographic production onto Format’s coverage of core social issues during the 1980s: Greenham Common; gay and lesbian activism; and the miners’ strikes.