chewing gum shaped like female genitalia. Through
this performative piece, Wilke participated in, con-
structed, and controlled her own objectification,
thereby invoking and destabilizing the power of
the male gaze. Condemned by feminist critics as
narcissistic and exploitative of her own beauty,
Wilke’s final series of photographs served as a chil-
ling response to those critics. In herIntra-Venus
series from 1992–1993, Wilke (with Donald God-
dard) produced photographs of her body while
undergoing treatment for cancer. These images,
much like Cindy Sherman’s later color works,
force the viewer to confront their expectations of
the female body and female beauty. In comparison,
American photographer Jeanne Dunning has taken
up the human body as subject, mingling notions of
the body and the grotesque, in a series of photo-
graphs of bodies and food. Since the 1990s, Dunning
has created vibrant large-scale color photographs of
bodies covered in ambiguous puddings and liquids,
with messy, oozing flesh. Although Dunning’s work
is about the actual body itself, not representations of
the body per se, again like Sherman and Wilke she
encourages the viewer to look at something that is
considered taboo in our society. The following gen-
eration of feminist photographers will take up this
concern, picturing bodies that have been consistent-
ly overlooked.
Other Voices, 1980s–1990s and After
In the late 1980s and 1990s, a plenitude of racially
and sexually defined women artists gained recogni-
tion for their photographic work that looked to
represent their identity in contrast to Western,
White, heterosexual standards of femininity. It is,
essentially, a bit misleading to isolate these women
here as the third generation of feminist photogra-
phers, for much of their work overlaps with or fits
into categories of feminist art production already
discussed in this essay. However, for continuity
and clarity, I have chosen to discuss these women
as a group. An impressive list of feminist artists
beginning with veterans Clarissa Sligh, Pat Ward
Williams, Lorraine O’Grady, Carrie Mae Weems,
Lorna Simpson, and Deborah Bright, carrying
over to a younger generation of women including
Catherine Opie, Laura Aguilar, Kaucyila Brooke,
Jolene Rickard, Korean-born Young Soon-Min,
the Australian Tracey Moffatt, and others, worked
to identify their own discourses of identity and
representation. Although richly diverse in ethnicity
and ideology, much of the work of these women
artists is rooted in notions of family and commu-
nity, and stems from their own personal histories.
Clarissa Sligh and Carrie Mae Weems, for exam-
ple, initially photographed, or used photographs,
of their own families in their works. In herReading
Dick and Jane with Me book project from the
1980s, Sligh reconstructs the standard American
public school reader published between 1935 and
1965, with images from her own family album.
Within and among the images, Sligh interjects her
commentary on the differences between the upper
middle class happy White family depicted in the
readers and her own experience as a poor black
child growing up in the American south. Carrie
Mae Weems began photographing herFamily Pic-
tures and Storiesseries, 1978–1984, where she uses
text and images to tell her own family story, when
she was a college student in California. In this
series, Weems presents an intimate yet complex
portrayal of her family where she, as the photo-
grapher, functions as an insider and an outsider.
Weems returned to photograph her working-class
family as an educated black woman. Although
emerging out of their unique personal histories,
Weems and Sligh create imagery that resonates
with the African American community and has
relevance to all members of families. In her
Untitled Kitchen Table Series from the 1990s,
Weems uses herself as the model in a series of
domestic narratives that circulate around a kitchen
table. Combined with poetic text, the images in this
series,much like Cindy Sherman’sUntitled Film
Stills, are less about Weems’s experiences and
more engaged with constructions of femininity
and domesticity in American culture. Even photo-
grapher Tracey Moffatt’s fictional photo-nar-
ratives, where she also uses herself as the model,
stem from her background growing up female and
aboriginal in a predominantly White, working class
Australian suburb.
In photographing the members of their commu-
nities, Catherine Opie and Laura Aguilar also use
photography as a way of representing their own
identities. Located in Los Angeles, Opie and Aguilar
picture different lesbian communities. In herLatina
Lesbians series, an ongoing photographic project
begun in 1986, Aguilar combines black and white
images of lesbian women set in mostly domestic
interiors with handwritten descriptive captions writ-
ten by the sitters themselves. In contrast, Opie’s
Being and HavingandPortraitsseries from 1991
present large-scale vibrantly colored studio portraits
of her friends within the local lesbian and S-M
communities; communities that remain relatively
unseen in our culture. InBeing and Having,Opie
photographs her lesbian friends in masculine drag,
whereasPortraitssympathetically depicts transsex-FEMINIST PHOTOGRAPHY