Hannah Starkey makes large-scale photographs of women in public spaces by hiring actors or models to pose for her, then adding props and scouting architectural settings with symbolic resonances. By photographing women in ambiguous narratives—as in this cinematic scene, in which a pregnant woman stands waist-deep in water in front a large expanse of windows—Starkey questions the documentary nature of photography and its representation of gender. She often leaves her photographs untitled but includes the month and year in which the image was completed.

Bettina von Zwehl situates the photographic portrait within the long history of portraiture by referencing bygone stylistic approaches such as the painted miniature and the cut-paper silhouette. The Sessions comprises fifty silhouette portraits of the same young girl, with their edges torn to create irregular borders. The series presents multiple facets of one individual, with the variation of torn edges counterbalancing the inherent replicability of the silhouette format.

In 2002 the magazine Vogue Hommes invited Vanessa Beecroft to produce a series considering masculinity. This work depicts a naked model posed in a headstand, next to a clothed man—Beecroft’s brother—who stands upright. By staging the figures in front of Milan’s Palazzo di Giustizia (Palace of Justice), Beecroft references her brother’s profession in the field of law. He wears the clothing of contemporary status and power, while the woman hovers out of time and place, an idealized fantasy of subordinate beauty.

In her series Encounter, Silvia Rosi reenacts images from a “lost” family album, posing as either her mother or father and including details that represent their migration from Togo to Italy. Here, Rosi poses in front of a colorful backdrop that evokes the vibrant practice of West African studio portraiture.

In her Gestures of Demarcation works, Melanie Manchot portrays herself outside, naked, and looking at the lens. Another person, fully clothed and facing away from the camera, pinches and tugs her skin. As viewers, we are uncomfortable witnesses to the scene, forced to question the issue of public versus private space and the integrity of the individual within communal systems. “My work employs performative strategies to chart gestures, moments of transformation or personal rituals through which my subjects collaborate,” Manchot has said.

In her Vogue Series, Caroline Heider proposes that a folded photograph—typically considered damaged—can be “recycled” into art and critique. Heider foregrounds the role photography plays in advertising and fashion by repurposing magazine images, inserting a fold in them, and rephotographing the now-interrupted narrative. Her interventions halt the endless cycle of desire such images create by ensuring that the viewer can no longer consume the initial message.

Milja Laurila’s inability to remember the time she spent living in Tanzania as a small child led her to explore the relationship between photography, memory, and identity—the way one can look at a photograph of oneself without recognition. In the series In Their Own Voice, Laurila asks what it means to be observed in different pictorial regimes. She transfers existing medical photographs of female subjects to transparent acrylic and groups them in horizontal arrangements.

In Because Every Hair Is Different, Marlene Haring explores hair as a powerful physical marker of femininity and desirability. Beginning with the idea that long, fine, blond tresses are the quintessence of feminine beauty and pushing it to an absurd extreme, Haring transforms herself into a surrealistic creature. Her gesture, at once performance, installation, and photography, complicates the link between hair and beauty: potentially, hair is also burdensome and grotesque, demanding an endless investment of time and money.