In this two-part piece, Barbara Probst embraces multiple perspectives of a single moment. Each image is integrated into the narrative of the other while simultaneously unraveling it. In one photograph, the protagonist appears to be running from the camera, perhaps playfully; the aerial image of her on a rooftop, however, suggests more ominous surveillance. Probst reveals her process by regularly including her camera and tripod in her work, their presence either confirming the truth of the image or breaking it down.

Sigrid Viir produced this diptych for a solo exhibition in which she performed the act of creating a body of work. Twelve pairs of photographs represented the duration of the exhibition, with accent colors (pink, in the case of Day 1) corresponding to paint she applied to a sculptural object and pedestal in the gallery each day. Folding and manipulating her own self-portrait, Viir comments on the artist’s compulsion to replicate a style or self in relation to art world demands.

Uta Barth created this series while traveling in unfamiliar cities, hurrying along, often finding herself lost. She became interested in the things she noticed out of the corner of her eye, which caused her to “double take.” These two works depict the Tate Modern in London while the museum was under construction in 2000. As viewers shift their eyes from one point of scrutiny to the next, the image they have just been looking at—bits of reflected light—moves into the periphery.

In this series, Josephine Pryde shows young women’s hands in close encounters with their bodies, screens, or other objects that serve to define them. Her cropped compositions create pitched tableaux that skew ironic and inscrutable, while her use of the vertical phone-camera format mirrors contemporary methods of photography and display. Frozen in time, the women’s unselfconscious gestures seem stylized, pointing toward the selfhood we seldom acknowledge while continually gazing into the world of our smartphones.

To make Red Swimmer and other works in this series, Boo Ritson applied brightly colored house paint directly on the faces and bodies of her sitters, transforming them into characters loosely based on American stereotypes. She then asked photographer Andy Crawford to capture these painting-sculpture-performance hybrids before the paint dried. As Ritson explains, “I'm not a photographer; I'm an artist who uses photography. In its raw state, my work can only be seen by me and the people I work with, so photography is essential. I can't show my work without it.”

Shirana Shahbazi makes photographs in traditionally European styles and genres—including still life, landscape, and, in this case, portraiture—questioning hierarchies and sometimes translating her images into different mediums. In Farsh132006, a photograph of a young woman’s head, reminiscent of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665), has been made into a hand-knotted carpet by artisans in Shahbazi’s native Iran. These multiple incarnations encourage us to consider the various ways signs can be rearranged and recycled today.

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.