Cut out: collaging against the invisibility of women in print climbing magazines

Abstract

Climbing magazines from the 1970s to the 2000s, originating as a product of male-dominated climbing cultures, provide a rich illustrative source for embracing visual methodology. Working as a multidisciplinary collective of four across history, art, sociology, we are using photomontage methods to interrogate the photographic representations, absences and stark invisibility of women and women climbers held within our climbing magazine collection. We engage collage as our means of working with the magazine imagery and representations therein. Situating art making at the kitchen table, Dada artist Hannah Höch (1889-1978) invites us to trespass towards a collective, resistant leisure activity. We do so by workshopping to deconstruct, disassemble and reassemble our visual artefacts to speak back and through the ways women’s bodies are objectified, and materially and discursively play out against exclusive leisure. Identifiable representations of women appear in the magazines, which chime with the complexities of absence, sexualization, and conditional inclusion. We chat and discuss and unobtrusively transcribe our emergent commentaries. Our visual methodology therefore invigorates the examination of women’s status within climbing culture past and present, across climbing and non-climbing audiences, revealing resonances between past and present attitudes to women, suggesting that representational strategies continue to impact discriminated groups.