Around 1919 French photographer performance artist and
Last updated: 3/31/2024
Around 1919 French photographer performance artist and writer Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob changed her name to Claude Cahun 1894 1954 and began cre ating staged self portraits and tableaux that defied socially accepted notions about beauty gender and identity In the early 1920s Cahun settled in Paris with her lifelong partner and step sibling Suzanne Malherbe 1892 1972 who adopted the name Marcel Moore Here the two began collaborating on photographic based works sculptures and written projects In her androgynous ever changing com pendium of self portraits Cahun surrealistically portrayed herself as a dandy model nymph soldier and with a shaved head Although her photographs do not appear aesthetically daring their straightforwardness plays off of our attachment to the idea that what a photograph depicts is true This makes her images even more otherworldly Cahun s chameleon like representations in which it can be difficult to determine the persona s gender challenged the surrealistic good old boys club that considered women as muses or erotic symbols By visualizing mul tiple gender possibilities Cahun concludes that identity can be malleable In 1937 the couple moved to the island of Jersey in the English Channel which was later occupied by the Nazis during World War II In 1944 due to their artistic and politi cal resistance activities plus Cahun s Jewish heritage the Germans arrested Cahun and sentenced her to death Although the sentence was not carried out her health never recovered from her brutal treatment while in German captivity Af ter the war Cahun s work fell into obscurity until the 1990s when her disconcert ing gender bending role playing images were recognized as precursors of Cindy This is a graded discussion 10 points possible Week 10 Discussion Post A Discussion Board Posts 25 total As a measure of your participation you will write 200 word minimum the readings as well as responding to at least one other post In these p to see concrete examples where you critically reflect on the readings T include citing specific photographs and photographers theoretical con between different readings ideas themes and or the author s own argu t