Claude Cahun, Untitled (1930)
Claude Cahun was a little known surrealist photographer who constantly challenged society’s understanding of gender and identity through her amazing photography in the 1920s and 1930s. I have always viewed photography as a significant aspect of art and one that contributes to our societies knowledge of past and current events and Cahun’s photographs stand out as an important step in feminist art. Cahun used photography to depict a range of gender identity and personal self, which stood out for its time period. As she “was one of the first 20th-century females to dress up and photograph herself in the name of art”, her work is groundbreaking for both photography and surrealism (The Guerrilla Girls, 62). Nevertheless, she is often left out of surrealism books and anthologies while listed as a man in others.
Claude Cahun, Untitled (1927)
Cahun was born Lucy Schwab in 1894, however, she later chose the name Claude Cahun, a gender ambiguous name. Her photographs also depict this gender ambiguous nature as she played constantly with the fluidity and performativity of gender by dressing like masculine youth, ultra feminine maidens, or completely ambiguous androgynies. She stood out from her male counterparts in both photography and surrealism at the time, and “instead of presenting herself as a passive object ready to be consumed by a heterosexual male gaze, she defiantly presents herself as both object and subject of her own sexual fascination” –The Guerrilla Girls (63) Male surrealist artists often viewed the female form as an object, something to be owned and consumed, and the “Surrealist manipulation of the female body can best be understood as a visual and aesthetic manifestation of male perversion (Knafo, 36). Cahun’s images also focused on the female body, however, “her photographs embrace her own image and challenge the gaze that had become accustomed to objectifying women” (Knafo, 36).
Cahun also toyed with the idea of identity. By continually changing her appearance, she suggested the different forms of identity and gender roles a woman was able to perform. She became both the self and the other through her multiple images and “by performing her Otherness through multiplicity and artistically playing with her marginality, she engaged her audience to reevaluate some of the possibilities of what a woman might be” (Knafo, 56). This concept of fluidity in identity is still not fully accepted today in society.
Claude Cahun, Untitled (1928)
Nevertheless, Cahun also suffered from a sense of loss and confusion as her past family relationships were strained and difficult. Her mother was taken to a psychiatric clinic as a young age and her father sent her away to a boarding school soon after. She later fell in love with her step-sister who became her life long partner, however, this relation caused a great deal of stress in the family. Her images reflect this difficult past with a constant search for identity.
As an artist, Cahun took a major step in changing the perception of women and gender. She stood as a female figure in a predominantly male controlled art form, and as a Jewish lesbian in times of homophobia and anti-Semitism, her commitment to her art becomes even more significant. She challenged societies understanding of a woman, gender, and identity through her formation of a fluid identity and a gender not necessary bound by labels. I feel she is also an amazing example of how we perform and create gender simply through appearance and body language. She mastered an understanding of how we perceive gender and identity to be able to easily change it. Her photographs speak directly to Cultural feminist theory suggesting that gender is a constructed set of actions one is not inherently born with.
Knafo, Danielle. “Claude Cahun.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 2.1 (2001): 29. Women’s Studies International. EBSCO. Web.
The Guerrilla Girls. First. The Guerrilla Girls Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. New York: the Penguin Group, 1998. Print.
Images from:
http://www.preview-art.com/features/actingup.html
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