The Yellow Rose Project: A Photobook Review

A book review of the Yellow Rose Project by over a hundred women, published in ZEKE Magazine, Spring 2026.

Link to Published Article

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The 2024 Presidential Election was the first time I exercised my right to vote. 

At 21, I approached the ballot not just as a new voter, but as a woman coming of age in a moment of democratic instability. As I watched my government dismantle forms of autonomy I had grown up believing were not only guaranteed to me as a U.S citizen, but were defended and fought for, I was forced to confront my own responsibility as a voter. In that reckoning, I, too, came to understand that “the ongoing fight for women’s rights was just that—ongoing, fragile, and hard-fought. The struggle has not ended.” (Meg Griffiths, The Yellow Rose Project, xiii)

The Yellow Rose Project brings together 106 female photographers in a collective act of response, reflection, and reaction to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Through varying perspectives, this body of work imbues the strength, complexity, and responsibility of being a woman in the United States. What began as 200 emails sent by curators Meg Griffiths and Frances Jakubek to women across the country, inviting them to respond photographically to the amendment, quickly grew into a testament of shared memory and collective power. The resulting book is not merely a compilation of images but rather an active source inviting a multidimensional discussion on the evolving meaning of women's rights in the United States.

Rana Young. Untitled.

Peaking through an unsealed envelope is the image of a woman seated amongst a row of men. The men sit in full-length trousers, suit and tie, their legs spread wide and their hands openly on display, atop their knees. At the center, the woman is wedged between them. She wears a skirt, her knees drawn inward, her frame compact. Her hands are folded neatly in her lap. Surrounded by men whose postures project a certain assertiveness and self- presumed authority, her presence feels deliberate and restrained. What’s assumed as almost incidental reveals something far more conscious, composed, ironic, resilient. “Often serving as proxies for personal truths, photographs telescope our lives to unveil our most vulnerable sentiments and circumstances, while critically shaping individual and collective memory,” the photographer, Rana Young, discusses in her artist statement. 

In 1920, the landscape of civic engagement in the United States saw an irrevocable revision. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment not only expanded the electorate but birthed an ongoing movement for women’s civil rights.  Tennessee, becoming the decisive state to ratify the amendment, not only secured constitutional change but also set in motion generations of activism and resistance. With yellow roses adorning the lapels and coat pockets of supporters in the state legislature in Tennessee,, the yellow rose became a visual declaration that civic participation is both a right secured and a responsibility to sustain. As the introductory text to The Yellow Rose Project observes, “the images speak to the movement leading up to ratification, the legacy we have inherited because of it , and the work we will continue to do because of it.” (Griffiths, xiv)

Maude Schuyler Clay. Ishy’s Haircu

Some images are explicit, almost unambiguous in their intent. In one, a woman transforms a photobooth into a voting booth, each frame capturing a moment of photographer Kat Kiernan casting her ballot. The intimate sequence is playful yet straightforward, a creative expression of civic autonomy. Kiernan draws a parallel between the private spaces of a photo and voting booth, calling both “a place to make oneself heard.” Other photographs operate more obliquely. Figurative in scope, these images are deeply personal and quietly reflective. In one, a young woman watches her dog, Ishy, receive a haircut. While Ishy animates the foreground with mild commotion, the young woman observes intently from behind. Her chin is slightly lifted, the sunlight catches her face. In its mundanity, the image hums with suggestion: an image of the act of witnessing with delicate patience and care. While varied in approach, some declarative, others begging for interpretation, each image in The Yellow Rose Project contributes to an evolving definition of what it means to be a woman in moments of political uncertainty. Though refracted through distinct perspectives, the images collectively reckon with what democracy can signify for women in the United States.

Elizabeth M. Claffey. Untitled

In contrast, other images confront the historic and contemporary realities of women’s civic and personal experience in the United States. Like the book itself– originally intended for publication to coincide with the 2020 centennial of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment– these works feel energized not only by a legacy of activism but also by the pressing political urgencies of today. These images navigate the space between private doubts and deeply held convictions, offering personal reflections on lived experiences. Slightly unsettling in its subtlety, one image captures a white cable-knit sweater caught in an entryway, abandoned on a soiled floor– “a surviving symbol of struggle that indicates with its mere presence the continuation of whatever fight left it mangled or discarded, says photographer Elizabeth Claffey. Another image presents the cover for “The Ideal Scrapbook”, an archive of documents from the women’s suffrage movement, rendered as a photographic negative– a subtle irony and a self-deprecating nod. Though understated, the photographs stand as testaments to the intricate complexities of womanhood. Beneath their softness lies a haunting and deeply felt depiction of womanhood.

In terms of resonance, some images, to me, bespeak nothing exclamative, yet somehow resonate far more than others and are deeply understood. One such photograph by Sasha Tivesky, titled Shoes, depicts exactly that: a pair of shoes tucked neatly beneath a stool. This image appears to be unremarkable, yet feels strangely familiar. Perhaps it is the worn-down soles of the ballet flats, or the dated, slightly tacky fabric of the furniture, but there is an undeniable sense of recognition. It carries a kind of “punctum,” as Roland Barthes describes in his seminal critique of photography: a detail in an image that unexpectedly creates a personal, often unexplainable, connection. The image depicts an ordinary scene that speaks directly to the nuances of womanhood. It is in this regard that the book emerges as a work by women, for women. It is a conversation not only among the 106 contributing photographers– carefully woven together through selective sequencing by its curators– but among women beyond its pages. The book taps into the familiarities, insecurities, and complexities intrinsic to the experience of being a woman. These images resonate across generations, beyond backgrounds, and in ways that unite women through shared understandings and lived experience. 

Sasha Tivetsky. Shoes.

There remain one hundred additional images involved in the making of The Yellow Rose Project. Some are overtly theatrical, others are uncompromisingly political, and many carry a soft pinkish hue. Yet beyond the confines of any single spread, they belong to a broader and more urgent conversation. In a moment defined by political instability, to vote is not merely to select a candidate. It is to acknowledge those who organized and marched before us, and it is to reckon with the futures our choices will inevitably shape.“It is through this process of showing up and standing up, in that long tradition of women before us, that we must participate, have the tough conversations, and make the choice to voice our truths, whether through the photograph or through the ballot box.” (Griffiths, xiv) Together, these photographs remind us that democracy, and the amendment safeguarded for more than a century, can only endure through civic participation. They urge us not simply to inherit these rights, but to exercise and protect them. They remind us of our responsibility to vote thoughtfully, to remain well-informed, and to participate with active and sustained engagement.