Claude Cahun (Photofile) TR by Francois Leperlier

Product Details

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson (2024-02-13)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 144 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780500297490
• Item Weight: 249.48 grams
• Dimensions: 18.8 x 12.45 x 0.94 cm

The perfect primer on the surrealist writer and photographer Claude Cahun.

Claude Cahun (1894–1954), the chosen name of the artist Lucy Schwob, was best known in her lifetime as a writer but built up a remarkable body of photographic work that only came to prominence after her death.

Politically active and involved with a wide circle of artists and intellectuals, including the surrealists, Cahun followed her own rules in both life and art. She is best known for her strikingly staged self-portraits, in which she used costumes, makeup, and technical effects to tackle themes of identity and self-representation. Her love of symmetry, mirroring, repurposing, and retouching was also reflected in her approach to other styles of photography, including portraiture, photomontage, and still-life tableaux.

Whether working alone or in collaboration with her life partner, Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe), Claude Cahun was a pioneering figure in the aesthetics of modernity who never stopped crossing boundaries of gender and genre.

About the Author

François Leperlier is a French writer, essayist, poet, philosopher, and art historian, known especially for his work on the surrealist writer and photographer Claude Cahun. He has dedicated a large part of his life’s work to the rehabilitation and recognition of Cahun’s creative works, having rediscovered her nearly forty years after her death in 1954.