Untitled (Self-Portrait)

Artist, poet, essayist, performer, and political activist, Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) produced mesmerizing photographs and complex photomontages using herself as protagonist. This self-portrait- in which she presents herself topless, hair cropped, with a scarf or shirt pulled up and back around her neck-belongs to a group of fictionalized explorations Cahun undertook in the 1920s using the medium of black-and-white photography.

Born in Nantes, France, to a well-off Jewish family of intellectuals and educated at Oxford and the Sorbonne, Cahun was a lesbian who rejected social and sexual conventions. She shared many political, aesthetic, and social beliefs with the Surrealists, occasionally exhibiting her work in Surrealist venues, including the London International Surrealist Exhibition held at the New Burlington Gallery in 1936, and the Exposition Surréaliste d'Objets at the Charles Ratton Gallery in Paris the same year. Collaborating with her lifelong partner and stepsister, Suzanne Malherbe (who worked under the pseudonym Marcel Moore), Cahun combined her photomontages with some two hundred pages of her writings that explore dislocation, dreams, and the subconscious to create Aveux non Avenus (Unavowed Confessions) of 1930. The images and text together reflect Cahun's desire to re-create herself in various guises using familiar objects to produce unfamiliar ways of seeing. Like the Cubists before her, as well as her Surrealist colleagues, Cahun frequently incorporated words in her images to explore multiple meanings, with a recurring emphasis on ambiguity. "Beneath this mask another mask," reads a handwritten inscription on one photomontage; "I will never finish removing all these faces."

Through her work, Cahun became a storyteller, posing herself in single-person narratives. If her nineteenth-century predecessor Julia Margaret Cameron wanted to capture the "soul" of her sitters, Cahun wanted to capture and control her own image as a way of possessing herself. Cahun's photographs are often close-ups; in the AMAM photograph, for example, she scrutinizes her androgynous face and hairstyle and very visibly highlights her nipples. Staging scenarios-dressing up-has a venerable history in photography: some forty years later in the United States, photographers like Cindy Sherman took up with similar passion the exploration of self to comment on a complex range of gender issues.

In the late 1930s, Cahun and Malherbe moved from Paris to the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel where they had spent summers as children. During World War II, the island was occupied by German forces, and both women were arrested in 1944 for distributing anti-Nazi literature. They escaped execution only thanks to the war's end, and most of Cahun's manuscripts and artworks were destroyed. The diary of a German officer stationed on Jersey describes the arrest of the two Jewish women, whose home was searched and found to have "a quantity of pornographic material of an especially revolting nature. One woman had had her head shaved and been thus photographed in the nude from every angle. Thereafter she had worn men's clothes. Further nude photographs showed both women practicing sexual perversion, exhibitionism, and flagellation." Cahun's exploration of herself and gender ambiguity, clearly, continued unabated until the end of her life.