Images Dreamed from the Inside

This article reflects on the process of researching and writing a critical-creative account of women and girls in photography history. It contemplates the challenges of drawing close to one’s objects of study—both the textual materials of feminist media studies and the subjects they represent—and calls for feminist scholars to undertake this work all the same. Approaching photographs as vital objects of ongoing encounter, the article argues for the value of deeply researched yet also imaginative and inventive scholarly writing that attempts to dream images from the inside and, in the process, opens the scholar to being dreamed by the images. This can mean facing up to difficult personal experiences or reckoning with vexing ethical issues, such as the dangers of identification across time and place as across formations of race and class. The article argues that one of the ethical gifts of the photograph is how it both imbricates us and excludes us—a double gesture that can allow us to connect scholarship to life in our pursuit of the feminist future.