Claude Cahun

Claude Cahun (25 October 1894-8 December 1954) was a French photographer and writer. Her work was both political and personal and often played with the concepts of gender and sexuality. Born Lucy Schwob in Nantes, she was the niece of writer Marcel Schwob and the great-niece of Orientalist David Lon Cahun. In around 1919, she settled on the pseudonym Claude Cahun, intentionally selecting a sexually ambiguous name, after having previously used the names Claude Courlis and Daniel Douglas. During the early twenties, she settled in Paris with her life-long partner and stepsister Suzanne Malherbe. For the rest of their lives together, Cahun and Malherbe (who adopted the pseudonym Marcel Moore) collaborated on various written works, sculptures, and collages. She published articles and novels, notably in the periodical "Mercure de France". Her adoption of a sexually ambiguous name, and her androgynous self-portraits display a revolutionay way of thinking and creating, experimenting with her audience's understanding of photography as a documentation of reality. Her poetry challenged gender roles and attacked the increasingly modern world's social and economic boundaries. Cahun epitomized the chameleonic and multiple possibilities of the female identity. Her photographs, writings, and general life as an artistic and political revolutionary continue to influence countless artists, namely Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin. Cahun's work explores the interior and plays with the metamorphosis of self. Her androgynous polymorphy, her adoption of various theatrical disguises (vampire, gymnast, swami, masked gypsy, braided girl, mannequin, angel) and of the trappings of either gender, sometimes of both within one image, melts the boundaries drawn by the construct of two polar oppositional genders. During much of her life, Claude Cahun cut her hair very short and dyed it rose, gold, or silver, when she didn't shave it off completely. In her mimicry of all codes of social representation, she eludes any claim of one "true" identity, calling into question the concept of there being any one true identity. For Cahun it seems not so much a desire to BE the other gender but to dissolve the borders...