A boxed set devoted to the great women who made the history of the medium: three volumes for an extraordinary journey that runs through that whole history seen with a female eye. Taking stock of his creation in 2017, Robert Delpire, founder of the long-running Photopoche series — published in Italian by Contrasto — could not help noticing that out of more than a hundred and fifty volumes on the greatest masters, very few were devoted to women. The same is true, more widely, of publishing and of exhibitions in general. Out of that awareness came the project of the historian Clara Bouveresse and of Sarah Moon, herself an author and Delpire’s widow, who set out to explore the fundamental contribution of women and to draw up a kind of long catalogue of the most significant among them. For there have always been women in the trade, and they have run studios, registered patents, told the world, experimented, searched, and practised their talent in portraiture, in surrealist montage, in fashion and in reportage. The first volume gathers the Pioneers of 1851 to 1936 — enterprising and courageous experimenters such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Claude Cahun, Imogen Cunningham and Tina Modotti, women who took hold of the medium from its very beginning.