As the modern era gave way to the postmodern, issues of gender and representation came to the forefront in Western photographic art. The medium of photography was uniquely suited to address postmodern aesthetic and conceptual concerns and became a primary tool for artists to subvert existing norms of gender representation within art and society. Artists working within this genre helped to redefine how we view art photography and what role gender and sexuality plays in visual representation. Although artists like Claude Cahun in the early 1900s helped pave the way for later feminist challenges, radical shifts in how women sought to visually represent themselves began to emerge in the 1970s. These shifts were inspired in large part by Laura Mulvey’s 1975 critical essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” This pivotal text in feminist theory utilized psychoanalytic concepts to present what Mulvey viewed as pressing concerns for feminists in cinema: principally,
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