Rae is based in Australia, Melbourne, but came to my knowledge through her exhibition at CCA Galleries alongside Claude Cahun’s work. Her work is influenced by feminist theories and the female body, she uses her body as the focal point of many of her images. The iamge below is taken from her series ‘Never standing on two feet‘, which consider’s Cahun’s engagment with the physical and cultural landscapes of Jersey The photographs Cahun produced in Jersey are intimate. They explore an idea of self within the immediate environment and were produced in collaboration with her lover, Marcel Moore. Many threads of inquiry emerged for me while viewing the archive: Cahun’s performative photographic gestures; the nature of photographic performance for a lover; and the repercussions of imaging a woman’s body aging over time, to name a few.

This photo is powerful through it’s use of naturalistic imagery with the combination of a portraits. There is high contrast between the two genres, yet they work in harmony in this image if hers. Feminist ideologies can be seen via her clothing choice of a skirt, which is connotated as a stereotypical feminine item. The posture is ‘un-lady like’, how her legs are open and she is slouching backwards over the rock as if she is at home and not in public. She uses black and white, which is influenced by the work of Claude Cahun at a time when colour photography was fairly new and expensive.The black and white symbolizes the out-dated patriarchal society Cahun once lived in, where there were certain gender roles written into everyday life, that belittle women as the inferior sex. Rae is challenging dominant modes of representation around female identity. This image is a self-portrait, which she is set up and captured on a timer, a main interest of her work is experimenting with performance documentation and how the camera is part of the image, it isn’t just a witness, it’s a performer as well. Although her positioning and posture is awkward and uncomfortable, it doesn’t overpower the image, it blends with the romanticism of the surroundings. Rae’s use of femininity also creates a sense of delicacy, she may be wearing a skirt which has connotations of sexual confidence, but it is mid-length which adds a sense of modesty. She doesn’t want to drown out the background with over-sexualising and objectivity her body. The way she is laying vulnerably over the rock, suggests lack of control over her gender. Many women face sexism and have their life planned out by society, some don’t get an education, some will only ever be a stay at home mum, who cooks and cleans for the duration of her life. Her work relates to my photobook as it displays ideas of conflict with gender/sexual identification. This links to my work as I am exploring personal identity and how it fluctuated and confused me at the time of my parents separation. Her fusion of nature and identity I am going to use in some of my shoots. I feel that nature connects to the idea of genetics and family, which relates to the fact you are born into a certain bloodline whether you like it or not, you have no free-will in the matter.