Claude Cahun also know as Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob was born 25 October 1894 was a French surrealist photographer Schwob adopted the pseudonym Claude Cahun in 1914, During the early 1920s, she settled in Paris with lifelong partner Suzanne Malherbe who adopted the pseudonym Marcel Moore. The two became step-sisters in 1917 after Cahun’s divorced father and Moore’s widowed mother married, eight years after Cahun and Moore’s artistic and romantic partnership began.

In 1937 Cahun and Moore settled in jersey Following the fall of France and the German occupation of Jersey they became active as resistance workers and propagandists. Fervently against war, the two worked extensively in producing anti-German fliers. Many were snippets from English-to-German translations of BBC reports on the Nazis’ crimes and insolence, which were pasted together to create rhythmic poems and harsh criticism. They created many of these messages under the German pseudonym Der Soldat Ohne Namen, or The Soldier With No Name, to deceive German soldiers that there was a conspiracy among the occupation troops. The couple then dressed up and attended many German military events in Jersey strategically placing their pamphlets in soldier’s pockets, on their chairs, and in cigarette boxes for soldiers to find. Additionally, they inconspicuously crumpled up and threw their fliers into cars and windows.

My intention with this project is to create a self-portraiture piece that displays my own recent personal experiences with the medical industry and the loss of self that comes with it. I plan to have two drastically contrasting images of myself; one in my old jacket and helmet that I wore when riding my motorcycle, and another in a hospital gown. I could use juxtaposition with colour palettes to help enhance this effect, maybe by using opposing monochromatic backgrounds.

I also plan to experiment further with techniques that I’ve learned this academic year and implement the concepts that I’ve explored in this unit so far into it, such as the diamond cameos and multiple exposures. Regardless, I want to use self-portraiture to reflect my own identity in the pieces I create, however, I also want to see if I can capture other people in the same way, as I obviously don’t know them as well as I know myself.

All ideas are in photoshoot plan post.

Links/bibliography

https://www.artnet.com/artists/justine-kurland/

https://nmwa.org/art/artists/justine-kurland/

https://clarerae.com/

Website I used the most for inspiration:

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/05/justine-kurland-new-book-girl-pictures

Justine Kurland inspired mood board:

Other images/ different concepts id want to incorporate in my photoshoots:

Justine Kurland – ‘female utopia’

My main inspiration is from her book called ‘girl pictures’ its exactly what I wanted to base my photoshoot on and how id like to represent femininity. It shows girls coming together and the simplistic caring traits that are shown.

About Justine’s book/photography:

Kurland started this project in 1997 when she was a graduate student at Yale. In an essay at the back of the book, she crowns Alyssum as “the first girl” to be photographed. It started as a kind of make-believe. At fifteen Alyssum had been sent to live with her dad, whom Kurland was dating at the time. While he was at work, the two women bonded and began a collaboration, merging imaginations to plot out a narrative of a teenage runaway. Kurland went on to find more make-believe runaways, but one of the images from this time seems to hold a special importance; a portrait of Alyssum takes up a full spread towards the end of the book. Perched in a cherry tree between the Hudson river and a highway, Alyssum looks back over her shoulder. The river seems to flow away, while the headlights of cars on the road seem to be approaching. With her body in profile, Alyssum doesn’t seem to follow either direction.

Analysing some of Justine’s images:

Adventure stories were a source of inspiration for this project. The girls in Girl Pictures plagiarize these myths until they become their own, until the original myth is hardly relevant anymore. What’s left after all this repetition of runaway legends and costumes are the common themes: rebellion, self-sufficiency, confidence. A kind of inverse of the American Dream, but with the same carrot on a string: freedom. Perhaps this is why we love runaways so much.

We see worn out overalls holding onto a girl’s body by one strap. The girl at the centre of this image guides the others, looking past the camera as if it doesn’t even matter, as if the thing worth examining is actually behind us.

But of course with freedom comes the threat of danger. So many of the images in Girl Pictures were taken outside in locations that feel desolate or easy to overlook. They are often staged under bridges or beyond fences or on the sides of highways; places that feel synonymous with warnings.

The focal point of the image is the back of a young girl who is raising her shirt. Instead of her face, we see the eyes of all the girls surrounding her, watching the big reveal. There’s one boy in the group, but his eyes are covered. A girl has wrapped her arms around him from behind and places her fingers over each of his eyes. It’s funny to see such an obvious removal of the male gaze, especially as it’s still present – and yet the delicate hands of a teenage girl prove capable of obstructing it. As viewers we look from his covered eyes to her watchful ones.

Yet it feels beside the point to spend too much time considering a male perspective when looking at this project. The subjects move on, and do more interesting things. They collapse in the snow in ‘Snow Angels, 2000’, and roast marshmallows over a garbage fire in ‘Puppy Love, Fire, 1999’. It starts to feel as if they exist in their own reality, just removed enough. This is especially strong in the photographs that appear to capture two parallel worlds.

There are other things uniting all the girls in these photographs. The deeper you get into the book, the more difficult it becomes to see each girl as a distinct character. The camera stays just far enough away to keep the subjects slightly anonymous. Or perhaps it’s because they are mostly long haired, or wearing similar clothing, or belonging to that vague age range that captures adolescence. Whatever it is, they begin to blend together into one visually unified group of girls. 

Kurland’s focus is less on individual girls, and more on what happens when they band together.

I found this text on a website and i agree with how i perceive the book and the idea of how girls specifically teenage girls are represented:

‘I don’t know any of the girls in Justine Kurland’s Girl Pictures, but it really feels like I do. Or at least, I must have seen them. Maybe they were there on the side of the highway, or in some public restroom, or just standing on a sidewalk as I passed by. The girls in their baggy jeans and bare feet. The girls in their leather boots and used sweaters. There’s something about them that feels like so many teenage girls. The images in this book weigh me down with a sense of nostalgia, and it’s not just the late nineties fashion. It’s the fact that the girls seem to be disappearing. Like catching a wild animal in a trap, it feels like by the time you look at each image of these girls you’ve already missed them. They’ve run off to someplace better or just some place that isn’t here.’

Using this book as a reference I’ve found that it creates an emotional connection and deeper meaning.

Yasumasa Morimura

Yasumasa Morimura, born in 1951 in Osaka, is a Japanese artist whose work deals with issues of cultural and sexual appropriation. Morimura studied art at Kyoto City University of Arts and in 1985 made his first avant-garde self-portrait based on an iconic portrait of Vincent Van Gogh. Since then, Morimura has taken iconic images from pop culture, the media, and art history and deconstructed them using costumes, makeup, props, and digital manipulation to make provocative self-portraits.

His works exude playfulness and attest to the artist’s self-described role as an entertainer who wants to “make art that is fun.” His work often consists of inserting his face and body into portraits of artists and celebrities from history. Similar to American photographer Cindy Sherman, Morimura uses extensive props and digital manipulation to create his images, resulting in often-uncanny recreations of iconic works. “Taking photographs is generally an act of ‘looking at the object, whereas ‘being seen’ or ‘showing’ is what is of most interest to one who does a self-portrait,” he has explained. “Self-portraits deny not only photography itself, but the 20th century as an era as well.” Simultaneously reverent and satirical, his self-portraits manage to skewer traditional notions of beauty while revealing a deep appreciation for the art he appropriates.

Some of his more well-known pieces:

I would say this is my favourite image by him. I love the stylisation of the images, from the way his hands are placed to the lighting slowly fading as you go further down on his face. I picked this artist because his work really breaks down gender ideals, that men can’t wear makeup and supposedly “feminine” clothing, this could be fit into androgyny, fitting the theme of my project, as he dresses up as both females and males for his work.

Claude Cahun, born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob, was a surrealist, photographer, sculptor and activist. She is best known for her gender fluidity in art and her anti-Nazi resistance. She was from Nantes and was born into a provincial Jewish family. From an early age, Cahun struggled with her gender identity and in the early 1920s, she adopted the first name Claude because it could be a man or a woman.

Cahun combined several elements of surrealism, including reflections and doubling. A common theme in her work was the subversion of society’s expectations of women. Even in photographs where Cahun appears more traditionally feminine, she adds elements such as cropped hair to defy expectations of beauty.

One of my favourite images of Cahun’s is “Self Portrait of a Young Girl”. It depicts her lying in bed, looking quite sickly, hair spread out around her, reminiscent of Medusa’s. Most observers note that the tone and appearance are not appealing, many depictions of women on a bed in fine art are eroticized and Cahun’s point of view is a stark contrast to this. Cahun herself has said that the image reflects her mental health struggles after her mother fell ill and had to be committed to a mental hospital.

Cahun was friends with many Surrealist artists and writers and André Breton once called her “one of the most curious spirits of our time.” While many male Surrealists depicted women as objects of male desire, Cahun staged images of herself that challenge the idea of the politics of gender. Cahun was championing the idea of gender fluidity way before the hashtags of today.  She was exploring her identity, not defining it. 

In 2017, Gillian Wearing opened an exhibition in the Nation Portrait Gallery, this showed her recreating multiple of Cahun’s images using makeup and prosthetics, for example, her most famous recreation is of Cahun’s image “I am in training, don’t kiss me”. During this exhibition, Wearing often referenced what Cahun famously said “Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces.,” this reference is very much shown in the image “Me as Cahun holding a mask of my face” where she is recreating the image made by Cahun I have previously mentioned however with her own twist to it in which she is dressed as Cahun in the image, but she is holding a mask of her own face. 

About Francesca Woodman

She was an American photographer who created black and white pictures, capturing herself and other female models in interesting ways. Her photos show herself and other women either in unique outfits or stark naked, in weird positions. The photos mostly appeared to be blurred, since she used a slow shutter speed, letting more light in to create movement in a eerie way throughout her work. She was born on April the 3rd in 1958 and died on the 19th of January in 1981, aged just 22 years old. Despite her dying so young, Woodman has continued to inspire many upcoming photographers, being an icon of self- expression in photography.

Her father was a painter and photographer and also lectured in photography at the University of Boulder in Colorado. Her mother was a ceramicist and sculptor. She took her first self portrait at the age of 13, and then went on to continue to photograph herself and other women until she died. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design and travelled to Rome as part of its honours program in 1977. In 1980, she shared many of her portfolios with fashion photographs, wanting ‘to make a career in photography’. She was rejected, however, which lead to her becoming deeply depressed and she attempted suicide in autumn of that same year. A breakup with her boyfriend also added to her depressed state. This lead to her having to live with her parents, unfortunately in early 1981, she took her life after jumping out of a window.

Although Woodman used different cameras and film formats during her career, most of her photographs were taken with medium format cameras producing 2+¹⁄₄ by 2+¹⁄₄-inch (6×6 cm) square negatives. Woodman created at least 10,000 negatives, which her parents now keep. Woodman’s estate, which is managed by Woodman’s parents, consists of over 800 prints, of which only around 120 images had been published or exhibited as of 2006. Most of Woodman’s prints are 8 by 10 inches (20 by 25 cm) or smaller, which “works to produce an intimate experience between viewer and photograph”.

“Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be a ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner” 

– Francesca Woodman

The ‘Die Young’ Effect

There are always celebrities and other artists that die young, which for some reason always leads to more questions about their short life. Suicide has always been seen as a taboo aspect of our life, but something that draws fascination and interest from the public, especially when it is a famous or talented person. Like many others, Woodman died young and left behind her interesting story along with her unique art. Her photographs were almost like a representation of her short life, the ghostly obscured and intimate photos clearly being a portrayal of her and her personality. Her portraits portrayed her as vulnerable and isolated, but also intense and powerful, creating a interesting contrast.

Her Work

Here are some famous examples of her work, where she portrayed herself in many different positions and angles. Every single photo is unique and full of mystery, causing her style to be an inspiration for many. She challenged the idea that the camera captures a single time and space – something that had always been seen as one of the fundamentals of photography. She manipulated light, movement and photographic effects, and used carefully selected props, vintage clothing and decaying interiors to add a mysterious gothic atmosphere to the work and create a new technique of portrait photography. The concept of vulnerability is brought up a lot my critics, and although I do understand that her poses create a sense of vulnerability, her pictures embrace her, a lot of the time naked, body in a powerful manner, showing she is the one in control.

Image Analysis

One of her most iconic photographs, portraying her in a bent over position on top of a mirror, capturing her staring intensely into the camera lens. It is believed that it was a photo she sent to her boyfriend at the time, sending it in advance to her return to the US from Italy.

This photographs composition is very interesting, being taken from a bird eye view angle, capturing her entire body in the shot. The entire look of the photo creates a mysterious mood throughout the image; the black and white causing us to focus more on her face which appears blurry as through she was moving. This along with the wild look in her eyes creates her to have an unhinged appearance, adding to the eeriness of the photo. She appears to be naked on the lower half of her body, adding to the weird look of the photo and creating another interesting aspect to the photo, perhaps being something to do with the photo being meant for her boyfriend, Woodman portraying herself in a seductive way and enhancing the sexual representation within the photo. Despite her face not being in focus, it is clearly the area of focus within the photograph, her neutral expression contrasting with her wide- open eyes, causing the viewer to immediately look at them. The mirror creates an interesting shape around her, framing her body and causing us to focus on her even more. Moreover, the dark tone of the wood contrasts again her light skin and clothes, causing her to stand out even more. The mirror creates an idea of other dimension, and her face being blurred creates a sense of timelessness.