Their works, however were often indistinguish-
able from that of their male counterparts, which
suggests that female photographers adapted male
conventions rather than achieving their particular
aims; indeed some women photojournalists, such
as Margaret Bourke-White, may be said to have
outdone men at their own game in her extreme risk-
taking to get views never before captured, such as
from parapets of skyscrapers. As well, the statistics
about the presentation of women’s photographs in
major monographs and the representation of work
by women in major collections at the time (1994)
averaged about 10% compared to their male col-
leagues. Despite their advances, Rosenblum points
out, ‘‘the fact that women’s work remains ‘under-
funded, under-exhibited, under-studied, under-re-
presented’ suggests that efforts at parity still have a
way to go’’ (Rosenblum, 9).
After a brief flowering of images showing a more
liberated or fluid notion of gender representation in
the interwar years, it was not until the mid-1960s
that both female and male photographers took up
the topic of the loosening of mores that accompa-
nied the Sexual Revolution. While male artists
tended to exploit the larger range of imagery now
deemed acceptable, including representations of
overt sexuality and pornography, female photogra-
phers turned their attention to self-representation
as well as representation of men from their view-
point. Marie Costinas’s depictions of sailors in
pastel-tinged Polaroids (Sailors, Key West, 1966)
are noteworthy.
The inequality in the treatment of men and wo-
men, and not exclusively in the realm of the arts,
was especially a concern to artists during the 1980s
who incorporated political statements into their
work. Artists such as Barbara Kruger, Jenny Hol-
zer, Cindy Sherman, and Sherrie Levine used
photography in confrontational ways to challenge
the constraints and conventions of female represen-
tations as well as professional roles in advertising,
language, film, and art. According to H.S. Mirza,
‘‘whereas 1970s and 1980s feminism centered on
the ‘right to be equal,’ the postmodern feminism
of the 1990s turned to the celebration of the ‘right
to be different’’’ (Mirza, 12–13). By mixing humor
with cold hard facts these artists have tried to pique
curiosity at the same time that they raise the pub-
lic’s consciousness. Cindy Sherman’s adaptation of
stereotypical tropes for the representation of wo-
men to create her various persona, particularly in
her Film Stills of the 1970s initially seemed retro-
grade. Yet these images, in being pried away from
the domain of the male photographer and claimed
by a young female, proved seminal and inspira-
tional to others in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
Francesca Woodman, conceptual artist Ana Men-
dieta, and younger figures Cynthia Wiggins and
Katy Grannan, and many others created images
that evoked the conventions of the male gaze but
telegraphed female autonomy to behave and create
depictions as necessary to the artistic project of
the individual.
Pushing boundaries has been a consistent modus
operandi in the late twentieth century. This often
took the form of making the private public to the
point that there seemed no boundaries between the
two. In representations of gender, depictions have
ranged from the conventionalized, as in Larry
Clark’s expose ́of the sexualized heroin sub-culture
he was part of in hisTulsaportfolio (1972), which
depicts rather straightforward, albeit graphic, het-
erosexual behaviors, to Nan Goldin’s diaristicThe
Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1987), which in
focusing on New York’s demi-monde presents a
wide range of gender behaviors, including that of
transvestites, gays, and other so-called alternative
lifestyles. In the 1980s and 1990s, gender represen-
tation widened noticeably to include numerous
depictions of gays and lesbians often by openly
gay photographers. Robert Mapplethorpe was cer-
tainly a pioneer in this area, adapting a classical
model of representation to depict persons and acts
many viewers found disturbing or even shocking.
Los Angeles-based Catherine Opie undertook a
series of large-format color portraits of gays and
lesbians who posed unabashed and undisguised in
their presentation of self as gay individuals. Opie’s
representations in particular are resonant precisely
because they often operate on paradoxical signals,
with homosexual females adapting costumes and
poses typically associated with heterosexual males,
and homosexual men showing extreme manipula-
tion of their bodies with tattoos and garments also
associated with macho heterosexual subcultures
such as bikers to signal their orientation.
An obvious endpoint to the discussion of gender
in the twentieth century is the ostensibly fluid nat-
ure of gender boundaries. Yet sexual ambiguity,
transvestitism, and hermaphroditism have intri-
gued numerous photographers throughout the cen-
tury, including Brassaı ̈(The Prostitute Bijou at the
Bar de la Lune in Montmartre,Paris, 1933), Diane
Arbus (Young Man in Curlers, 1966 ,Naked Man
Being a Woman, Hermaphrodite and Dog in Carnival
Trailer, 1970, and so on), Joel-Peter Witkin (Ma-
dame-X,San Francisco, 1981), and Nan Goldin
(Misty and Joey at Hornstrasse, 1992). Both Claude
Cahun’s self-portraits (1920s–1930s) and Catherine
Opie’s portraits (1990s) explore lesbian sexual iden-REPRESENTATION AND GENDER