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Claude Cahun — Self Portrait
Claude Cahun

Self Portrait

1925

Rendered in gelatin silver print, this 1925 self-portrait by Claude Cahun stands as one of the most charged and intellectually alive works produced during the interwar period. Cahun's photographic practice was inseparable from a lifelong interrogation of identity, gender, and selfhood, and this image carries that inquiry with unmistakable intensity. The work belongs to an edition of 30, numbered verso, lending it both documentary authority and the considered scarcity that characterizes Cahun's legacy as it enters institutional and private collections worldwide. Cahun occupied a singular position within the Surrealist milieu, though her work consistently exceeded the movement's categories. Where many of her contemporaries treated the body as a site of fantasy or symbolic projection, Cahun turned the camera on herself with a quality of confrontation that reads as acutely contemporary. The self-portrait format, repeated across her career in varying guises and costumes, functioned less as autobiography than as a sustained philosophical act, one that refused fixed identity in favor of multiplicity and ambiguity. At 31.8 by 24.1 centimeters, the print is intimate in scale, encouraging close attention and rewarding it generously. For collectors, this work represents a rare opportunity to acquire a signed example from a body of photographs now recognized as foundational to the history of identity-based art, performance documentation, and feminist visual theory. Cahun's prints appear infrequently on the market, and signed works within a defined edition carry particular significance for those building collections around the critical history of photography and 20th-century avant-garde practice.

Medium
Gelatin silver print
Overall
Signed
Yes
Location
CLAMP, New York, NY

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About this work

Claude Cahun, Self Portrait, 1925

Rendered in gelatin silver print, this 1925 self-portrait by Claude Cahun stands as one of the most charged and intellectually alive works produced during the interwar period. Cahun's photographic practice was inseparable from a lifelong interrogation of identity, gender, and selfhood, and this image carries that inquiry with unmistakable intensity. The work belongs to an edition of 30, numbered verso, lending it both documentary authority and the considered scarcity that characterizes Cahun's legacy as it enters institutional and private collections worldwide. Cahun occupied a singular position within the Surrealist milieu, though her work consistently exceeded the movement's categories. Where many of her contemporaries treated the body as a site of fantasy or symbolic projection, Cahun turned the camera on herself with a quality of confrontation that reads as acutely contemporary. The self-portrait format, repeated across her career in varying guises and costumes, functioned less as autobiography than as a sustained philosophical act, one that refused fixed identity in favor of multiplicity and ambiguity. At 31.8 by 24.1 centimeters, the print is intimate in scale, encouraging close attention and rewarding it generously. For collectors, this work represents a rare opportunity to acquire a signed example from a body of photographs now recognized as foundational to the history of identity-based art, performance documentation, and feminist visual theory. Cahun's prints appear infrequently on the market, and signed works within a defined edition carry particular significance for those building collections around the critical history of photography and 20th-century avant-garde practice.

Medium
Gelatin silver print
Dimensions
overall: 31.8 x 24.1 cm
Year
1925
Signed
Hand-signed by the artist
Seen at
CLAMP, New York, NY

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Collected by

Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, Art Institute of Chicago