Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob) was a French photographer and writer. she has a very good reputation for being one of the first people to explore gender fluidity through photography, making her working advanced for her time even through it would have been seen as quite controversial as gender fluidity would have been looked down upon by the majority of the public in the 1940s .

Claude Cahun was born on October 25th 1894 in Nantes France, who would later move to jersey in 1937 a few years before one of the most historical things would ever happen in jersey (the Nazi invasion). she would eventually have to hide her religion and her identity to pretend to be German. making her work even more of a risk during the occupation as the Nazis were against any sort of gender fluid idea as they wanted to create the “perfect race”.

Cahun photographed herself in many different outfits and settings in self portraits to explore many different identities. her reasoning behind this was because she liked the idea that femininity and masculinity could be altered and challenged in multiple different ways as shown in the photos above and bellow

this photo is titled “under this mask, there’s another mask”

Cindy Sherman

born in united states, in 1954 Cindy Sherman is a photographer who was known for her feminine characters and the identities she would create, it was as if she was playing a character in each photoshoot. she was the idea behind it all as she was the model, photographer, stylist and the make up artist.

over a period of 4 decades she took a numerous amounts of photoshoots exploring the idea on how to create and represent femininity. Cindy Sherman’s most famous pieces came from the “untitled film still #21” which was essentially Cindy Sherman in black and white photos where she would have multiple different outfits and personas.