Women have always been a favourite subject of every portraitist, photographers included. But in this extraordinary gallery of portraits, those behind the camera are other women. It begins with two great nineteenth-century photographers, Clementina Hawarden and Julia Margaret Cameron, and over more than a hundred years comes to the present through photographers such as Lotte Jacobi, Germaine Krull, Dorothea Lange, Gisèle Freund and Dora Maar, up to Annie Leibovitz, Ellen von Unwerth and Vanessa Beecroft. Ninety women authors and 160 images define a female image behind and in front of the camera. The themes are the social, the family, personal identity, the body and virtual reality, seen through the decades, fashion, art, literature, dance and show business. The woman before another woman’s lens is friend, accomplice, double of her soul, mirror of her being. With the help of Elisabeth Bronfen’s text, the book builds a panorama of women’s photography: a unique working tool for the history of photography and for the history of women.