Contemporary Female Photographers

Our upcoming New York Photographs auction features an array of works by contemporary female photographers. From revealing self portraits to atmospheric landscapes, discover a spectacular selection of works that highlight women behind and in front of the lens.

Read on to see our specialist's top picks, and register to bid before 5 April.

Lot 51

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #100

In 1982, Cindy Sherman made four large-format portraits in her ‘Pink Robe’ series, in which she wears a chenille robe and minimal make-up. Each work is oriented vertically, in contrast to the horizontal compositions of her 1981 ‘Centerfolds’ series. The quartet of images morph into progressively darker compositions that culminates with Untitled #100.  This extreme close-up view of Sherman's crouching body is bathed in shadow, with only a few highlights on her face, hands, and left knee. This series ushered in a new era of Sherman's career, in which she would predominantly make color prints in a vertical format for the next three decades. This particular image has not been offered at auction in nearly twenty years.

Lot 50

Mona Hatoum, Static Portraits (Cecilia, Chris and Galen)

Mona Hatoum’s Static Portrait photographs were made using a large-format Polaroid camera during the photographer’s 2000 residency at MassArt, in Boston. Hatoum invited her subjects to hold a Van der Graaf generator, the resulting images comically portraying each individual with their hair on end.

In a conversation with Christine van Assche, curator of Hatoum’s 2015 survey at the Centre Pompidou, she discussed levity within her artistic practice. “Humour has always played an important role in my work. I often combined it with a touch of Surrealism to contradict or deflate some of the serious issues. . . I am interested in Surrealism because I see it as a visualization of the contradictions and complexities that exist inside us and a way of making art out of one’s inner reality rather than with the logic of our mind.”

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Lot 56

Shirin Neshat, Rebellious Silence (from Women of Allah)

One of the most arresting, recognizable images from Shirin Neshat’s Women of Allah series, Rebellious Silence depicts Neshat herself and exemplifies the four elements intrinsic to this body of work: the unerring gaze, the veil, the gun, and textual markings. The artist’s handwritten ink annotations come from an excerpt from Allegiance with Wakefulness, a poem by the Iranian writer Tahereh Saffarzadeh, which explores themes of martyrdom and resilience.

Neshat’s work scrutinizes the complexities of female identity within the Islamic Republic of Iran, placing a particular emphasis on the psychological effects of martyrdom, which was encouraged and institutionalized during the country’s 1979 revolution. In a 2017 interview with The Guardian Neshat remarked, “These Iranians were caught between self-sacrifice, devotion, love of god – and cruelty, violence and death. We often think of women with an Islamic background as being passive and submissive to men, but here they were really empowered by bearing arms.”

Lot 47

Anne Collier, Mirror Ball

Over the past two decades, Anne Collier has not only investigated how we see, but has also questioned how we are seen.  From close-up views of her own eyes to more traditional self-portraits that document her face and body, she has taken ocular mechanics – and the camera lens as an extension of our ability to see –  as the starting points for her work.

In this quiet but witty self-portrait, Collier captured part of her face and her camera reflected in a mirror ball, itself a dizzying optical device that splinters the world into a kaleidoscopic field of visual shards. Collier’s eye is almost positioned at the center of the composition, literally and figuratively the eye of the storm from which all sight and insight stem.

Lot 28

Nan Goldin, Geno in the Lake, Bavaria, Germany

Nan Goldin’s highly personal, diaristic photographs chronicle her life and relationships, each image granting access to a moment of intimacy. The uninhibited, pastoral scene documented in Geno in the Lake is rendered in the rich hues and deep tonality for which Goldin is known.  Geno appears in several images by Goldin, but in this particular work she is identifiable only by the title. The bird’s-eye view of her nude body descending into the water recalls wide-ranging art historical references, such as Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Rembrandt’s A Woman Bathing by a Stream, or Degas’s many images of bathing women.

Lot 27

Sophie Calle, North Pole

Sophie Calle’s atmospheric photograph North Pole belongs to her series Because, in which the title of each work explains the artist’s relationship with her own image-making and narrative memory. Each print is housed in a wooden shadowbox that is draped with a felt curtain embroidered with text that justifies the image. Although Calle’s work is often comprised of photographs and text panels in diptych and triptych form, Because presents a departure: the viewer is asked to consider the photographer’s textual narrative first, before gaining access to the image.

Taken during the artist’s travels in 2008, North Pole is what Calle has dubbed an “orphaned” image captured at a moment when she felt compelled to take a particular photograph without an obvious connection to her other works. The text reads: “Because I am there, on the bridge / Because I am with Marie who doesn’t take pictures / Because we are alone / Because that’s what you do when you are at the ends of the earth / Because I won’t be back to the North Pole anytime soon / Because I can’t resist / Because of the silence / Because of the solemnity / Because of day when it is night / Because of the blue, the clear sky, the grey sea / Because it is the night of September 11 / Because I want to believe in this image / Because you never know / For the memory of it.”

Lot 16

Rineke Dijkstra, Isabel, Berlin, December 28, 1998

Dijkstra’s quiet, incisive portraits capture adolescents in the process of transitioning from childhood to adulthood. Their power stems from their ability to document a specific moment in time as well as remaining emblematic of an extended era of change and instability. Here, Isabel stood still against a hazy, white background while the camera lens focused intently on her face and torso. Her dreamy, disengaged stare allows us to observe her at a particularly inward moment; her expression and demeanor remain emotionally enigmatic, but beautiful nonetheless.