Abstract

Claire Beaugrand-Champagne was 27 years-old when she completed her first assignment for Le Jour—a new, young, independentist and left-leaning daily newspaper in Montreal. The year was 1974, and she was by all historical accounts the first woman to photograph the news in Quebec. Relatively few women in the province have followed in her footsteps since. Globally, women continue to be vastly underrepresented among staff and freelance news photographers. This essay examines, from a sociohistorical angle, some of the gender-specific challenges women photojournalists face in newsrooms, as well as how they have been able to overcome or bypass the barriers to their integration. It draws from existing, but relatively thin research in the field of journalism, which tends to examine women news photographers in the context of the United States. As such, it attempts to make a contribution by extending focus around the emergence of women photographers in the sociopolitical context of Quebec, through the case study of Claire Beaugrand-Champagne.