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In Her Own Words: Contemporary Women Photographers on the Female Gaze

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These portraits and self-portraits – all taken by women photographers – demonstrate the collectors’ long-standing support of female artists. Each image is paired with the photographer’s own words to elucidate how and why she documented herself or other women.

In Her Own Words: Contemporary Women Photographers on the Female Gaze

  • Hannah Wilke
    S.O.S. Starification Object Series

    “Since 1960, I have been concerned with the creation of a formal imagery that is specifically female, a new language that fuses mind and body into erotic objects that are namable and at the same time quite abstract. Its content has always related to my own body and feelings, reflecting pleasure as well as pain, the ambiguity and complexity of emotions.”

    –Excerpt from Wilke’s 1976 text written for a Guggenheim Foundation Grant
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  • Marina Abramović
    Portrait with Scorpion (Open Eyes)

    “From a very early time, I understood that I only learn from things I don’t like. If you do things you like, you just do the same shit. You always fall in love with the wrong guy. Because there’s no change. It’s so easy to do things you like. But then, the thing is, when you’re afraid of something, face it, go for it. You become a better human being.”


    –Quoted in ‘Interview: Performance artist Marina Abramović: ‘I was ready to die,’' in The Guardian, 12 May 2014
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  • Katy Grannan
    Untitled (from Poughkeepsie Journal)

    In order to find the portrait subjects featured in her series Poughkeepsie Journal (1998-99), Grannan posted ads in local papers in upstate New York: “Art models. Artist/photographer (female) seeks people for portraits. No experience necessary. Leave msg.”

    The process of documenting real people in their actual homes magnified Grannan’s visual interest in the quotidian. “The comparison that I make in my own life is that, since I was young, I’ve always found “real life,” the mundane stuff, to be almost unbearable. At some point, I recognized that I was completely wrong, because that’s exactly where the magic is happening. So now it’s like I’m seeing familiar things for the first time.”

    –Quoted in ‘Katy Grannan: Interview by Tabitha Soren,’ Issue magazine
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  • Jitka Hanzlová
    Selected Portraits from Female

    “I like to photograph women. Why? It was a time of many questions, and I also questioned myself: ‘What does it mean to be a woman? What is the role of women today? What is my role? How can I define myself in this very masculine society?’ So I tried to make images about women. Then I came to New York for my first exhibition in 1999. . . and I thought, ‘Oh Goodness, this is the place where I can make this work.’ I started to photograph here, without language, just walking through the streets and looking for my subject. . . I discovered New York, women, and myself - my identity.”

    –Excerpt from Hanzlová’s lecture at the International Center of Photography, New York, 24 October 2012
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  • Rineke Dijkstra
    Central Park, New York, August 18, 2005

    "For me, it’s the personal relationship [of photographer and subject]. . . I am interested in the people I encounter. . . Precisely because something is frozen in time, you can look at it and see it in a way that often slips past you in the everyday world. For me, the importance of photography is that you can point to something, that you can let other people see things. Ultimately, it is a matter of the specialness of the ordinary."

    –Quoted in Jennifer Blessing, 'What We Still Feel: Rineke Dijkstra's Video', in Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, exh. cat., New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2012, pp. 37-8
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  • Catherine Opie
    Kristopher & Clara, Tulsa, Oklahoma (from Domestic)

    In 1998 Opie undertook a three-month road trip to make images for her series Domestic. On the resulting portraits of LGBTQ couples and families, Opie has said: “It’s about creating communities and household systems everywhere in this country. Gender specificity and sexual preference can be ignored. I wanted to create a visual language of people living together, images about domestic space. I wanted to talk about community and family and not make it into ‘We’re normal,’ which drives me crazy. I’m interested in the difference of their households.”

    –Quoted in Cherry Smyth, ‘Signage on the Body,’ Diva 52 (September 2000), p. 11
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  • Nikki S. Lee
    The Seniors Project (12)

    Lee’s various ‘Projects’ explore specific cultural and social groups. By transforming her physical appearance through clothing and makeup, Lee seamlessly blended into a specific community and then took snapshots with its members. In this portrait of two elderly women, Lee stands on the left. “The work I do always needs to involve others, and that’s mainly because of my views about my own identity. I realized I couldn’t understand who I am without the people around me. I believe that it is only through my relationships with others that I can see myself.”

    –Quoted in ‘Photographer Nikki S. Lee Can Turn Into Anyone,’ The Creators Project, 21 July 2010
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  • Hannah Starkey
    Untitled - August 1999

    “The title of the ‘female photographer’ was kind of frowned upon, and even as a young photographer, I didn’t want it to be about my gender; it was about the fact that I was a photographer. But, very quickly, I began to realize that, No, I’m going to take that title of being a female photographer and I’m going to work solely on the female perspective because it is very important to take titles that might not seem popular at the time, but it is what you’re interested in. And the more I do it, the more relevant it becomes, because times change.”

    –Quoted in ‘Hannah Starkey - This is an Important Moment for Women,’ Tate Shots, 22 December 2017
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  • Laurie Simmons
    The Love Doll/Day 36 (Geisha Tattoo)

    “We ended up at the showroom [in Japan] where they were selling these love dolls, and I ended up purchasing one and having it sent to New York . . . The most profound thing for me about this love doll is that it’s lifesize and I was able to shoot this doll in any environment that I chose to shoot it in. For the whole rest of my work life, I’ve been shooting small-scale dolls and building sets to accommodate them. But suddenly I had a lifesize doll I could shoot in any environment – in my house, outside, leaning against a tree, jumping over a wall, sitting in a chair. So an entire new world was opened up to me because of the scale of this character.”

    –Quoted in the audio guide for the exhibition Laurie Simmons: Two Boys and the Love Doll, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, May - August 2015
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  • Cindy Sherman
    Untitled #425

    Sherman, who has used her own body as the basis for her portraiture since the 1970s, turned to the world of clowns in this series. “So many things suddenly made sense for the clowns, for the whole idea. . . I still wanted the work to be the same kind of mixture – intense, with a nasty side or an ugly side, but also with a real pathos about the characters – and [clowns] have an underlying sense of sadness while they’re trying to cheer people up. Clowns are sad, but they’re also psychotically, hysterically happy.”

    –Quoted in Clownlink, 2 February 2012
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  • Shirin Neshat
    ‘Stripped’

    Iranian-born Neshat hand-applies images and text in ink on her photographs.“Making art was a way of maintaining a connection with my country. I started with photography. I made these very provocative images of the women of Allah. The integration texts over the image come from my interest in Islamic art and architecture. The subjects are very contemporary, about the revolution, but the style and the technique goes back to something very ancient and classical.”

    –Quoted in ‘Shirin Neshat - ‘Dreams Are Where Our Fears Live,’ Tate, 2 July 2021
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