Little Women by Livv Welch Photography Final — Sequenced Body of Work. Shot with Canon AE-1 Program on Kodak Tri-X, Printed on Ilford Pearl RC paper. Shot, developed, and printed by me. This series began in the beginning of the semester, when I photographed my sister Ava reading Little Women, which is her favorite book. A few weeks later, I ended up at Author’s Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where Louisa May Alcott is buried. Then, Ava and I went to Gibbet Hill, where Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2020) was filmed. As I made these photos, I began to think about what it meant to be a woman back when the book was originally written versus what it means to be a woman now. I thought about the fight for women’s rights, suffrage, and how queer folx were always the ones leading that fight. I think it’s very different what it means to be a woman now than it was in 1868 when the Little Women book was written – most people now accept trans women and nonbinary people who use they/she pronouns as women. Not as womxn, not as “other”, but as just simply women. According to present day scholars, Louisa May Alcott herself possibly identified more as a man than a woman, she is quoted saying “I am more than half-persuaded that I am, by some freak of nature, a man’s soul put into a woman’s body.” (Thomas, Villarreal). Given all of this, I ended up choosing to make this work more inclusive of all women as well as gender fluid/queer/nonbinary people. I wanted to challenge that very binary.
