ted more directly on women’s issues. Mary Kelly
inserted psychoanalysis and semiotics in art prac-
tice and agitated the London art scene when she
first exhibited her now renowned Post-Partum
Document(1973–1979) at the Institute of Contem-
porary Art in 1979. Commenting on psychoanaly-
tic discourses of gender and motherhood, Kelly’s
complex multiple section, mixed media work used
literary, scientific, psychoanalytic, linguistic, and
archaeological modes of representation to docu-
ment the artist’s relationship to her son in his
early stages of development.Post-Partum Docu-
mentwas radical not only because it took on the
tabooed conjunction of motherhood and desire,
but also because it presented an analysis of language
and sexuality as socially determined. This kind of
statementwasnovelattheendofthe1970s,although
it would become the foundation of the emerging
discourse on sexual difference in the next decades.
Like many feminist artists of their generation and
after, both Rosler and Kelly were quite articulate
about their work and successfully negotiated the
crossover from artist to critic and vice versa.
Inspired by this developing feminist critique of
photography’s role in the perpetuation of gender
stereotypes, media-savvy artists such as Barbara
Kruger and Cindy Sherman created imagery that
worked against such stereotypes and undermined
the authority of the male gaze. In reaction to the
objectification of women in the art, advertising,
and Hollywood film industries, both Kruger and
Sherman adopted the very same strategies used in
those industries in order to subvert their power
and harness it for their own critique. After work-
ing for several years as an art director and photo
editor for fashion magazines, Kruger began in the
1970s to create image and word pieces, culminat-
ing in what have become her signature style photo/
text montages banded with red striped slogans.
Her untitled series of images, includingUntitled
(Your Body is a Battleground), 1989, appropriates
the look of the mass media in order to comment on
its pervasive power in our culture and its disembo-
died authorial voice. This piece, and others in the
series, also implies a specific political agenda, as
Kruger takes on the pro-choice/abortion debate
with the slogan ‘‘Your body is a battleground.’’
Kruger’s work became more politically engaged
over the next decades as she gained exposure
through a variety of international public art pro-
jects and poster campaigns.
The significance of the female body as a site for
political action and resistance, as seen in Kruger’s
work, was further developed in the work of Cindy
Sherman and would ultimately become the back-
bone of feminist photography for the rest of the
century. With her black and whiteUntitled Film
Stillsseries from the late 1970s and early 1980s,
Sherman expanded the gender discourse to focus
on the instability of identity, the social construc-
tions of gender, and the idea of femininity as mas-
querade. In these photographs, as in almost all of
her work, Sherman posed herself as the model in a
series of narratives that mimic classic Hollywood
film stills, although these images do not directly
reference any original film or story; they are com-
pletely made-up. Sherman’s photographs empha-
size the voyeurism of film, as the viewer often
peers in at the woman through a doorway, or a
window, or from below. By using herself to create
a seemingly unlimited cast of female characters,
Sherman not only forces us to confront our inabil-
ity to fix or locate her own identity, they point to
the precariousness and fluidity of female identity,
and femininity, overall. In her later color work,
Sherman moved away from typically glamorous
representations of women and pursued darker
more ambiguous images of femininity, images
that involved violence, eating disorders, and the
sex industry. For a series of images produced in
the 1990s, Sherman used various sex toys, dolls,
and other paraphernalia to create rather horrifying
large-scale ‘‘still-life’’ photographs in intense color.
Although harshly criticized for this work, with
these images Sherman was portraying the other,
overlooked side of the glamour and sex industries,
the side that sustains violence against women and
urges them to binge and purge in order to main-
tain an artificial standard of female beauty.
Sherman’s employment of the body, specifically
her own body, as a vehicle for social and cultural
critique, can be linked to a group of feminist per-
formance/body artists and their photographic pro-
duction. Feminist artists including Americans
Hannah Wilke, and Dorit Cypis and Cuban-born
Ana Mendieta, for example, all used themselves as a
subject in order to address issues of personal and
public identity. Ranging from studio pieces, to
earthworks, to mixed media installations, Wilke,
Mendieta, and Cypis use their own bodies to create
representations about the female body where they
implicate the viewer as a participant in their poten-
tially voyeuristic and narcissistic projects. In photo-
graphs made from the early 1970s until her death in
1993, Wilke, the most prominent of this group,
played with notions of narcissism, masquerade,
and female objectification. In herS.O.S.—Starifi-
cation Object Series, 1974–1979, Wilke pho-
tographed herself using various poses and props,
her body covered with small rolled-up pieces ofFEMINIST PHOTOGRAPHY