Emergence

Emergence is a 1977 portrait book by the photographer Cynthia MacAdams, gathering women who defined American feminism, art, and culture in the decade after the women's movement took hold. Four decades later it became the visual source for the 2018 Netflix documentary Feminists: What Were They Thinking?

Chelsea House published the book with an introduction by Kate Millett. It collects more than 100 black-and-white portraits, many shot in natural or infrared light, of writers, artists, actors, and activists including Patti Smith, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Judy Chicago, Meredith Monk, Alice Neel, Marisol, and Shelley Winters. MacAdams worked without studio lighting or elaborate sets. She photographed each sitter plainly and at close range, so the picture rests on the subject's own bearing rather than on staging.

MacAdams (b. 1939) came to photography from acting. She had appeared in Robert Frank's Me and My Brother and worked with Dennis Hopper before turning her camera on the women around her. Emergence remained her best-known project; she went on to photograph portraiture, the Bowery, and sacred architecture in black-and-white and infrared for decades afterward, working between Los Angeles and New York.