Claude Cahun:
Claude Cahun is a French-Jewish photographer that grew up in Nates (western France) with her mother but ended up living with her grandmother after at a young age, Cahun’s mother, Mary-Antoinette Courbebaisse, was institutionalised. Cahun faced anti-semitism at her high school in Nates, therefor she joined a private school during her time in Surrey.
Her work reflects her sexuality and ideas of gender-ambiguity. Much of her work involves self-portraits in which she usually looked directly at the viewer, showing her shaved head and shoulders, blurring an indicators of her gender.
Clare Rae:
Clare Rae is an artist based in Melbourne (Australia). In her photos she explores ideas of performance and gesture. A lot of her work is informed by feminist theory and usually presents an alternate experience of subjectivity and the female body.
Her work, a response to the earlier work of Claude Cahun, is defined by the main aspect of all the frames being of the artists body. Clare Rae understood that Cahun produced many intimate photographs in Jersey. Rae followed in this aspect by depicting her body in many of the photos, utilising gesture and the performing body to contrast traditional representations of the female figure and attract the male eye to the landscape rather than the body.