Gender and identity in portrait photography

My A* Photography A-level Personal Investigation Essay

This is my Personal Investigation essay I wrote for my Photography A level and got an A* for. I’ve been asked about how the exam and essay works, and I’m pretty proud of the research I put into it, so I decided to post it here. It dives into portraiture, LGBT history, and looks at marginalised photographers who all respectively explored their identity through their work. <3

TW: Depiction of Self harm, discussion of misogyny and homophobia

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My personal investigation looks at the work of photographers Catherine Opie, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Claude Cahun and Tseng Kwong Chi, and examine the ways in which they use portraiture (and self-portraiture) as a vehicle to explore aspects of their identity, often poking fun at the stereotypes placed on them by society. In my case, I will use portraiture to explore my identity as a trans and non-binary person.

I began by looking at themes of queer oppression and liberation expressed through portrait photography, beginning with American photographers Catherine Opie and Robert Mapplethorpe. “Cutting” is a self-portrait by Opie shot in 1993. Opie is turned away from the camera, showing only her bare back. Pictured are the fresh wounds of a bloody image scratched into her back. It shows a childlike image of two women in a happy family juxtaposed with the raw, bleeding skin and violent means by which it was created. It is purposefully viscerally unsettling for the viewer, showing the pain and suffering of queer repression and the scars that being barred from this life has caused. While you cannot see her face, Opie goes beyond the surface level by suggesting that the image cut into her back reveals just as much, if not more, about the subject's identity than a traditional headshot might.

Figure 1: Cutting (1993) by Catherine Opie¹

Opie’s approach is one that highlights the pain and suffering of oppression directed against the queer community. Photography has just as often been used as a form of queer escapism and joy, as used by Robert Mapplethorpe.

Mapplthorpe was a bisexual photographer active in the 1970s and 80s in New York City, whose work was extremely provocative and controversial, exposing cultural taboos around the male body as a sex symbol. He combined the classical approach he had learned from his still lifes and commercial photography, using a Hasselblad medium format camera and immaculate studio lighting in juxtaposition to pornographic scenes. Nudity in fine art was nothing new, but the distinction between artistic and pornographic nudity was based on the sexualisation (or lack thereof) present in the image. However, Mapplethorpe often sought to combine fine art with sexualisation and pornography, to glorify the male body and act as a vehicle for queer sexual liberation in a period dominated by the fear mongering and ostracization of LGBT community during the AIDS crisis. Due to the themes, identities and subcultures he tackled in his photographs, his work and persona were vehemently criticised by conservative art critics and politicians such as US senator Jesse Helms. Helms lambasted the use of public funds² via the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) to support a retrospective of Mapplethorpe’s work that was shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. in 1989. The conservative outcry was such that the exhibition was quickly cancelled by the gallery and funding was pulled so as to protect the NEA from being abolished by the Republican-controlled Congress outright. Additionally, Jesse Helms also sponsored and passed a bill under which the NEA could not “promote, disseminate or produce obscene or indecent materials, including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts, or material which denigrates the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or nonreligion.”³ The wording of the bill likened and considered homoeroticism as comparable to the exploitation of children. This bill is a clear example of the ways in which Queer artists were repressed and censored during the 1980s, and the “culture wars” of the period around gay men can be seen in the modern day with the current conservative hysteria aimed at trans people. Mapplethorpe’s work was used as a vehicle of sexual liberation for gay men of the time, and the conservative reaction to his work is a symbol of the censorship of and fight against that liberation. 

Not all of Mapplethorpe’s work was of a sexual nature either, exploring both commercial work and more traditional portrait photography. The Mapplethorpe portrait I’d like to focus on eschews the artist’s interest in kink and taboo in favour of a tender and intimate portrait - “Two Men Dancing”.

Figure 2: Two Men Dancing (1984) by Robert Mapplethorpe⁴

In Two Men Dancing, Mapplethorpe portrays two bare-chested models dancing together, with the photo intentionally cut off at the waist, so as to take the focus away from the models’ genitalia and towards the intimacy and tenderness on display. A different, softer version of queer liberation than the portraits featured in his “X Portfolio”, “Two Men Dancing” shows Mapplethorpe’s range and defies the critics who reduced his work to simple shock value. The photo was originally meant to be part of Mapplethorpe’s commercial work, but after developing it, he loved it so much he kept it for his private artistic collection. Like much of his work, this was shot during the AIDS epidemic (which took his life age 42 in 1989) where queer people were ostracised, demonised and treated as infected, and the combination of the royal symbolism and a queer portrait based on love as opposed to pain or hate is especially poignant. The symbolism of the crowns brought a sense of nobility and regality to an intimacy that was shunned by society at the time.

I sought to create work inspired by these themes of queer love and liberation, with my initial focus being on portraiture. While I was successful in producing good photographs in initial shoots, I found it difficult to go further in depth. Many attempts felt overly simplistic, expressing basic concepts of queer love but not making any kind of commentary on gender or sexuality in the way that the aforementioned queer photographers had. At this point, I transitioned my Personal Investigation to focus instead on self-portraiture. I found exploring someone’s relationships and identity to be an intrusive enough process that I already had to have a personal relationship to the subject, which greatly restricted the amount of people I could shoot, definitely not enough for a full Personal Investigation. While this shift in direction created new technical difficulties due to being both model and photographer, I found that it was much easier to direct myself and to comment on my own identity in a meaningful way, instead of trying to project a preconceived concept or idea onto other subjects, which often felt unnatural and insincere when trying to probe people’s deeper sense of identity or relationships any further than the surface level.

My next step was to investigate uses of self-portraiture in exploring themes of identity and gender, and Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherrman became my two main points of inspiration. I visited the Photographer’s Gallery in Central London to see both their work in person. Cindy Sherman and Claude Cahun both explored themes of gender identity through costume and performance in photography, but their perspectives and methods remained very different.

Sherman often sought to explore the performance of femininity in society in a playfully mocking way, whether it be the glamour of a mid-century movie star, the repressed yearning of a housewife or the jaded lost glory of a femme fatale.  Sherman said “It was the way I was shooting, the mimicry of the style of black-and-white grade-Z motion pictures that produced the self-consciousness of these characters, not my knowledge of feminist theory. I suppose, unconsciously, or semi-consciously at best, I was wrestling with some sort of turmoil of my own about understanding women.”⁵

Figure 4: Untitled Film Still #16 (1978) by Cindy Sherman

Figure 5: Untitled Film Still #27 (1979) by Cindy Sherman

Figure 6: Untitled Film Still #11 (1978) by Cindy Sherman

Sherman’s depictions of vulnerable and sexually charged women have drawn her criticism for being too close to the voyeuristic male-gaze photography she was trying to mock. In the catalogue for a 2012 retrospective of Sherman’s work, Eva Respini argued that she “plays into the male conditioning of looking at photographs of exposed women, but she takes on the roles of both (assumed) male photographer and female pinup”. However, I believe this is a reductive view. Sherman explained that “[It was] about the fakeness of role-playing as well as contempt for the domineering ‘male’ audience who would mistakenly read the images as sexy”.⁶ Sherman played into the voyeurism of male photographers through shots like Untitled Film Still #63 and #83, where she evokes the invasive paparazzi photography of 1950s Hollywood. The subject appears unaware that they are being photographed (despite Sherman being the subject and photographer), and the shot is captured from a distance, as if the photographer is stalking the subject. 

Figure 7: Untitled Film Still #83 by Cindy Sherman

Whether the context of the photo changes its voyeuristic nature and separates it sufficiently from the male-gaze photography she was critiquing is up to the viewer. While the prevailing feminist attitude both in the 1970s and now has been to focus on escaping the confines of femininity that society places on women, Sherman sought to inhabit and explore the performativity within these roles. She once said of womanhood and perhaps of her work as a whole - “There are so many levels of artifice. I liked that whole jumble of ambiguity.” While readings of her work are subjective and up to interpretation, I think that Respini and others with similar criticisms faill to take into account the satirical bent of her work and the commentary it makes by simply criticising it for playing into gender roles on the surface level.

Untitled Film Still #7 is a great example of this theory in practice. The negative originally featured a man in the right of the photo, but Sherman made the decision to crop him out. With the man removed, many viewers’ perceptions of the photo changed from a harmless paparazzi shot to a creepy or voyeuristic invasion of privacy. Sherman did this intentionally to highlight the patriarchal ways of thinking that are embedded into society, that a woman is safe she is with a man but is vulnerable alone.

Figure 8: Untitled Film Still #7 (1978) by Cindy Sherman

Figure 9: Contact sheet for Untitled Film Still #7 by Cindy Sherman⁷

While Cindy Sherman sought to explore themes of gender through inhabiting the roles and expectations placed on women, Claude Cahun sought to entirely reject the roles and classifications of gender altogether through androgynous gender presentation and surreal characters that existed outside of the bounds of social norms entirely. Cahun was part of the surrealist cohort of photographers including Man Ray, Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp. The largely male-dominated field of surrealist photography has been criticised for misogynistic treatment of women, disfiguring and reassembling the female body as raw material to explore (mostly male) subconscious desire. Part of the satirical response Cindy Sherman was making in her body of work was against male surrealist photography. 

Figure 10: Le Violon d'Ingres (1924) by Man Ray⁸

The surrealist obsession with the feminine still retained an objectification that the male surrealists could not escape from. Take for instance Andre Breton’s surrealist manifesto, which contains quotes such as ‘The problem of woman is the most marvellous and disturbing problem in all the world’. Guy Denning writes “Consequently this liberation of the feminine was rooted in traditional patriarchal ideology that though fought against was not broken free from.”⁹ To many male surrealists, femininity was interesting as it related to desire, and in terms of exploring gender norms, but not when it came to treating women as equals or free-thinking individuals. Marcel Duchamp had a female alter ego “Rrose Sélavy”, the phonetic equivalent of “eros, c’est la vie” or “sex is life”, and he appears in several 20s photographs in drag signed with his alter ego’s name. Here we can still see a preoccupation with femininity as an object of desire, but Duchamp at leasts subverts the classical male gaze by turning himself into the object of desire instead of a female muse or model. Man Ray further explored alternate forms of femininity through their photographs of Barbette, a popular trapeze artist who dressed and performed as a woman.

Figure 11: Rrose Selavy (1921) by Man Ray & Marcel Duchamp¹⁰

Figure 12: Barbette (1926) by Man Ray, commissioned by Jean Cocteau¹¹

It was in this context that Claude Cahun found themselves introduced into early 1930s Paris. Cahun and their peers drew inspiration from each other, with an aspect of surrealism present in many of their self-portraits, not to mention their direct influence on Cahun’s photomontage/collages.

Figure 13: I.O.U. (Self Pride) (1929-30) by Claude Cahun¹²

In their most famous image titled “I am in training don’t kiss me”, Cahun combines exaggerated feminine makeup with dumbbells, subverting and combining masculinity and femininity to create something new. I think Cahun is much more successful in their deconstruction and exploration of gender than the male surrealists because of the artist’s personal stake in the identity that they were exploring. There is also a difference between Cahun and Sherman’s focus on gender roles and performance is due to each of their personal relationships to gender. Cindy Sherman was essentially trying to explore the role of women and the performance of womanhood, where Cahun was trying to reject gender entirely as they were an early example of what would now call a non-binary person. In Cahun’s book “Disavowals”¹³ they write "Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me".

Figure 14: Untitled (I am in training, don’t kiss me) (1927) by Claude Cahun¹⁴

Figure 15: Autoportrait (variante i’m in training...) (1927) by Claude Cahun¹⁵

Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman served as the basis for the concept of my shoots, but I still needed to figure out how I was going to practically execute the concept. I started by using my DSLRs self-timer, but found it produced poor images as I didn’t have control over when the image was taken. I was either left waiting too long or was unprepared when the image was taken, meaning that I was always missing the “decisive moment”. 

My solution was to use a long bulb shutter release to take these photos, taking after Tseng Kwong Chi’s deliberate placing of the cable release in the frame of his self portraits. While it is traditional to hide the shutter release bulb underfoot or out of frame, I liked how dynamic the use of the cable release made his self portraits and wanted to emulate that for myself. Tseng Kwong Chi was a Chinese-American photographer who was born in Hong Kong but lived in New York. He used his self-portraiture to playfully explore themes of dual identity, creating the character of a cultural envoy and diplomat from China travelling to the West and expressing it through a series of public appearances in addition to his dynamic series “From East to West” where he poses in front of western cultural landmarks in his Mao suit and sunglasses.

Figure 16: Hollywood Hills, CA (1979) from the series “From East to West” by Tseng Kwong Chi¹⁶

You can see the shutter release clenched in his left hand, another idiosyncracy to add to the juxtaposition between him and the Hollywood hills, his emotionless stare and brightly lit chinese military uniform.

Robert Mapplethorpe also used the bulb release visibly in this 1974 self-portrait. This image attests to how a shutter bulb can be used to create dynamic and interesting poses, and draw attention to the body of the subject, something that Mapplethorpe explored throughout his career.

Figure 17: Untitled by Robert Mapplethorpe¹⁷

Now that I had figured out my sources of inspiration and how I was going to take the photos, I had to tackle the actual content of my photos. I was coming at identity through the lens of gender, being a non-binary person. I wanted to show both the masculine and feminine aspects of myself. While some artists may explore different facets of their identity through a series featuring different characters in each photo (ie Cindy Sherman), or through combining masculine and feminine features and creating androgyny in a single image, I wanted to see how I could split these two aspects of myself, femininity and masculinity, and present them as separate but in the same image.

Photographers have experimented with multiplicity photography for decades, tracing all the way back to Lewis Reed’s portraits and self-portraits in the 1920s.¹⁸ Reed would capture his subject(s) in one position then move them (or himself) to another position along with the camera to create a second exposure. He’d then “stitch” the two photos together in a darkroom, exposing each half of the photographic paper with different negatives. The stitching effect can be seen in the telltale black vertical line in the middle that results from the two exposures overlapping and in the distortion in perspective (as seen in the table in the image below). Reed’s work is visually imperfect and amateurish but nonetheless technically impressive and forward-thinking, especially for the time. 

Figure 18: Untitled by Lewis Reed

Figure 19: Untitled by Lewis Reed

The technique I used to create the same effect at the start of the project was surprisingly similar despite the rift in technology used. Like Reed, I posed in different places in two separate images with different perspectives, stitching them together using Adobe Lightroom’s panorama feature. When combining two landscape photos, an ultra-wider banner aspect ratio is created, and I experimented with several ways of including multiple versions of myself in the same image. 

Figure 20: Untitled (2022) by Jackie Ward

This initial work was focused simply on getting the technique right, and experimenting with ways of combining images to create multiple figures of myself. For this reason, initial shoots (including photos such as those above) did not focus on the themes of identity and featured the same outfits. However, as my work progressed, I introduced slight chances in clothing between positions (ie taking off/putting on a coat) before I finally introduced the masculine and feminine dichotomy with opposing outfits that I would change between photos. This was part of my reasoning for shooting in my bedroom, as it allowed me to gradually progress and develop my work, giving me the ability to shoot for as long as possible in a space I felt fully comfortable in.

Figure 21: Untitled (2022) by Jackie Ward

In my final bedroom multiplicity shoot and in my final Richmond Park project, I again changed the method I used. In the bedroom shoot I used the effects in photoshop to overlay images, using the multiply, screen and darken. tools. This created a purposefully surreal result, with the figures appearing ghostly or overlapping in many of the shots I compiled. However, the aim with the Richmond shoot was to achieve a more realistic looking set of photos, so I cut out the figures and pasted them over the other photos. This only worked because I kept the camera perfectly still throughout shooting (using my shutter release as always to take the photos) so that the background would be as consistent as possible from photo to photo.

I used my previous reference point of Cindy Sherman to approach the topic of my non-binary identity in these photos. Whereas many photographers commented on gender roles by subverting them, Sherman did the opposite exactly by playing into them and sarcastically commenting on them, looking at how femininity was viewed by society. In contrast, I played into the masculine and feminine tropes forced on people that exist outside of these binaries. Cindy Sherman made prominent use of character, which also played a part in my shoots, as I portrayed divas contrasted with suited bodyguards and Victorian couples in furs and frills. While I explored themes of identity through outfits, I purposefully did not change my hair and makeup (which Cindy Sherman did), as I still wanted to retain my identity (as a self-portrait) within the shots instead of transforming myself entirely into another character. Clothing has always been the way that I have expressed myself and my gender, and by playing into these masculine and feminine stereotypes I reclaim these roles through my androgynous presentation and poses.

Figure 22 & 23: “Untitled” (2023) by Jackie Ward

Having collected the photos needed for my final project, I looked to book work as a medium to present the shoots I had been working on. I wanted the book format to reflect the duality of masculine and feminine present in the project, and also to represent material from both my bedroom and Richmond shoots. While I was originally planning on making two separate books in the standard western codex style, I decided that after researching different styles that a dos-á-dos style would work better, allowing me to present both sets of images in one book, while still separating them due to their vastly different aesthetics. I thought it was important to present them in a single book despite their aesthetic and setting differences, as they both approached the same concept of playing with duality and masculine and feminine tropes to represent identity. While they draw on different eras and conceptions of masculinity and femininity, they both comment on the part as a whole.

1. Cutting (1993) by Catherine Opie. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/30354

2. Senator Jesse Helms. “Criticism of Robert Mapplethorpe”. C-SPAN, July 25, 1994. https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4634915/user-clip-jeese-helms-criticism-robert-mapplethorpe.

3. Andrews, Travis M. “Behind the right’s loathing of the NEA: Two ‘despicable’ exhibits almost 30 years ago” The Washington Post, March 20, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/03/20/behind-the-loathing-of-the-national-endowment-for-the-arts-a-pair-of-despicable-exhibits-almost-30-years-ago/. 

4. Two Men Dancing (1984) by Robert Mapplethorpe. https://walkerart.org/collections/artworks/two-men-dancing

5. Cain, Abagail. “A Brief History of Cindy Sherman and Feminism.” Artsy, June 2, 2016. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-is-cindy-sherman-a-feminist.

6. Davis-Marks, Isis. “Why Photographer Cindy Sherman Is Still the Queen of Reinvention.“ Smithsonian Magazine, October 16, 2020. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cindy-sherman-retrospective-reveals-why-photographer-still-queen-reinvention-180976068/. 

7. Cruz, A.; Smith, E. A. T.; Jones, A. (1997) Cindy Sherman: Retrospective (pp. 58,61,63,73,95) (Various by Cindy Sherman) (Figures 4-9)

8. Le Violon d’Ingres (1924) by Man Ray. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Violon_d%27Ingres#/media/File:Le_Violon_d'Ingres.png

9. Denning, Guy. “Surrealism and the feminine.” October 5, 1995. https://guydenning.org/1995/10/05/surrealism-and-the-feminine/. 

10. Rrose Sélavy (1921) by Man Ray & Marcel Duchamp. https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/56973

11. Barbette (1926) by Man Ray. https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/106HQF

12. I.O.U. (Self Pride) (1929-30) by Claude Cahun. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/834372

13. Joseph B. Treaster. “Overlooked No More: Claude Cahun, Whose Photographs Explored Gender and Sexuality.“ The New York Times, June 19, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/obituaries/claude-cahun-overlooked.html

Cahun, Claude. “Disavowals or cancelled confessions.” 1930. https://library.tate.org.uk/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/0/0/57/5/3?searchdata1=259014%7BCKEY%7D&searchfield1=GENERAL%5ESUBJECT%5EGENERAL%5E%5E&user_id=WEBSERVER 

14. Untitled (I am in training, don’t kiss me) (1927) by Claude Cahun https://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/claude-cahun/i-am-in-training-dont-kiss-me/

15. Autoportrait (variante i’m in training...) (1927) by Claude Cahun http://www.artnet.com/artists/claude-cahun/autoportrait-variante-im-in-training-owNE_F2sEQ54L7jChjcbXQ2

16. Hollywood Hills (1979) by Tseng Kwong Chi. https://collection.cmoa.org/objects/29badc68-4275-4e99-8ebe-d2a1f6c6094e

17. Untitled by Robert Mapplethorpe. https://artblart.com/tag/robert-mapplethorpe-thomas/

18. Reed, Lewis, Gartner, Jeanne. “Early Multiplicity Photography.” Reed Brothers Dodge History 1915 – 2012, March 15, 2018. https://reedbrothersdodgehistory.com/tag/early-multiplicity-photography/.