where are the women?

For Cinematography we are going to have to do a report on a cinematographer of our choice. As I'm not the kind of person to memorize crew names of films, I don't really know any apart from Haskell Wexler from last term's film studies presentation. So I've arbitrarily decided I want to pick an American woman working in fiction film. WHY ARE THEY SO HARD TO FIND?


Wikipedia tells me there are only 40 "female cinematographers" but looking through those pages most of them are foreign. They predominantly work in documentary or are directors who shoot their own indie films. Occasionally there are episodes of TV shows I've heard of, but almost no films I've heard of.

When I start with IMDB looking at films I've enjoyed they're all shot by men.

There is a documentary about cinematographers that we have to watch for class that we saw the first 15 minutes of last night. There were a couple of women in that. Watching it is not due for a couple of weeks, but I think I'll watch it sooner just so I can look up who those women are. And really those few women are less than 10% of the people they talked to for the film.

I don't generally consider myself a feminist and I had very little desire to go out to LA for a career. But now I kind of want to just so that the undergrad girls can see women making careers outside of hair, make-up, costumes, and casting.