REPRESENTATION AND GENDER
The visual manifestations of gender became in-
creasingly complicated during the course of the
twentieth century, and the late decades of the centu-
ry saw numerous photographers, female and male,
exploring gender in their works. A touchstone
image might be one made in 1968, Diane Arbus’s
Naked Man Being a Woman, New York City. This
seemingly straightforward, black-and-white pho-
tograph broaches aspects such as anatomical equip-
ment and appearance versus reality that have
subsequently become prominent in many photogra-
phic examinations of gender, demonstrating that
gender plays an important role in both the explora-
tion of identity and the presentation of self. Whe-
ther gender is considered in terms of the makers or
as subject matter, the resulting imagery blurs the
boundary between public and private issues that
was once firmly in place and considered ideal.
In most of the major artistic movements since
the Renaissance, roles for men and women were
very separate and conventional, for the most part
consisting of an active male creator and a passive
female subject. Early twentieth century art was ge-
nerally characterized by experimentation in the ser-
vice of ideas, and the ‘‘new’’ medium of photography
especially offered the promise of release from con-
cerns and constraints of gender roles and distinctions.
Yet the possibilities of exploding these conventions
were not immediately seized upon. Pictorialism, the
dominant style around the turn of the century, emu-
lated painting and conventional gender roles were in
fact adopted in most depictions. While female photo-
graphers were active in this movement in significant
numbers, they chose domestic scenes or touching
mother-and-child portraits as subject matters. Pio-
neering female photographer Gertrude Ka ̈sebier
was especially well-known for these depictions and
has been criticized for perpetuating stereotypes, but
she also made striking portraits of Indian activist
Zitkala-Sa that flew in the face of convention, gender
and otherwise.
Both male and female artists took advantage of
the ideal of the nude dancing freely in space as an
expression of modernity, but these nudes were gen-
erally female, young, and sylph-like. West Coast
Pictorialist Anne W. Brigman made many such
studies; however, it can be argued that these images
connate freedom from convention and joy in the
female body for how it can act, rather than merely
providing a focus for the gaze, prefiguring devel-
opments arising out of feminist photography late in
the century.
Many male photographers, such as those
involved in the f/64 group and notably Edward
Weston, tended to reinforce and magnify conven-
tional gender stereotypes. While Weston did make
some male nudes, they had the feel of classical
figure studies; his female nudes, many of his var-
ious wives and mistresses, portrayed the female
body as seeming on display for the gratification of
the male gaze. Weston’s paradigm of the perfectly
exposed and printed black-and-white photograph
of often faceless women in unusual or highly
cropped poses informed so-called fine-arts nude
photography throughout the entire century, and
provided a model against which many, in later de-
cades, worked.
Nudes by Andre ́ Kerte ́sz in the 1930s and Bill
Brandt of the 1940s through 1960s employed dis-
tortion to disorient and simultaneously distance
and highlight the experience of voyeurism inherent
in the notion of the conventionalized male gaze.
The nudes of Robert Heinecken of the 1960s and
1970s, such as hisCliche ́Varyworks and of the
fashion photographer Helmut Newton of the 1970s
and 1980s activate the border between celebratory
relish and pornographic objectification of the
female form. Were they not made by men, these
images might be interpreted as liberated or probing
expressions as being prototypes of the sexy self
portrayals put forth by pop icon Madonna in the
1980s and 1990s or performances of nude models
orchestrated by contemporary artist Vanessa Bee-
croft at the end of the century.
It was in the 1920s and 1930s that the practice of
photography and the position of women both
changed significantly. Photography and photogra-
phic realism were especially effective for the Dada
and Surrealist assault on rational thought because
the images were assumed to be truthful and any
manipulations would incite questions about the
truthfulness of reality. In the arena of the Eur-
opean avant-garde in general and Surrealism in
specific, however, followed the well-trod traditions;REPRESENTATION AND GENDER