Claude Cahun – författare

Cancelled Confessions reveals Claude Cahun to be a major surrealist writer and pioneering queer theorist almost a century ahead of her time.‘The re-appearance of this glittering and dissenting semi-lost epic is a gift… Cahun’s writing is stylish, playful and prescient, peopled with angel slang, flowering disavowals, God’s lipstick and an infinite layering of masks.’ Daisy Lafarge, author. In 1930, Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) and her partner, artist Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe) published their surrealist masterpiece, Aveux non Avenus, translated here as Cancelled Confessions and available in English for the first time in twenty years.Susan de Muth’s revised translation of Cancelled Confessions has a new introduction by art historian Amelia Groom which contextualizes it within contemporary queer discourse.‘It’s a surrealist, trans, queer, autofiction, (anti)memoir, and also none of those things. It’s a text, and a life, felt as connection and at the same time completely singular.’ McKenzie Wark, author.‘The kaleidoscopic text is pieced together from diverse fragments… there are philosophical and subversive theological musings, aphorisms and fables, letters and dialogues, dreams and hymns, nightmares and jokes,’ writes Groom.The book’s nine sections are prefaced by dreamlike photomontages (reproduced in high definition here) which reflect, illuminate and converse with the verbal content.Upon publication, Aveux non Avenus simply baffled all but a few of Cahun’s friends and admirers, leading Cahun to describe herself as, ‘An unwanted Cassandra’. Now, however, is the time of the remarkably prescient Cahun and Moore.‘Cahun was a pioneer of gender-bending role-playing…eerily ahead of her time she has attracted an almost cult-like following.’ The late David BowieCahun and Moore’s appeal is wide and universal. They were adventurers in life as in art. Cahun famously terrified Andre Breton in the 1920s when she appeared in a Paris café with her head shaved and painted gold. Having moved to Jersey in 1938, Cahun and Moore waged a mischievous two-person resistance campaign against the occupying Nazi forces from 1940. Finally caught and imprisoned in 1944, they were sentenced to death in 1945, saved at the very last moment by the armistice.

Women Photographers 1900–1975: A Legacy of Light presents the work and lives of over 80 women whose contributions to photography have been historically underacknowledged Featuring a carefully curated selection of images, essays and poetry, this volume is a rich collective portrait of artists whose vision and influence shaped the medium in profound ways. With images by: Berenice Abbott, Karimeh Abbud, Laure Albin Guillot, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Diane Arbus, Gertrud Arndt, Ellen Auerbach, Lillian Bassman, Hilla Becher, Ruth Bernhard, Ilse Bing, Katt Both, Margaret BourkeWhite, Anne Brigman, Claude Cahun, Lizzie Caswall Smith, Marjory Collins, Olive Cotton, Imogen Cunningham, Louise DahlWolfe, Maggie Diaz, Nora Dumas, Mikki Ferrill, Trude Fleischmann, Sue Ford, Virginia Fraser, Gisèle Freund, Heather George, Viva Gibb, Christine Godden, Fiona Hall, Ponch Hawkes, Annemarie Heinrich, Florence Henri, Kitty Hoffmann, Ruth Hollick, Kati Horna, Dorothy Izard, Lotte Jacobi, Carol Jerrems, Frances Benjamin Johnston, Joan Jonas, Consuelo Kanaga, Gertrude Käsebier, Germaine Krull, Dorothea Lange, Melanie Le Guay, Helen Levitt, Grace Lock, Inez McPhee, Dora Maar, Madame d’Ora, Bea Maddock, Marion Marrison, Lee Miller, Alice Mills, Jacqueline Mitelman, Lisette Model, Tina Modotti, Lucia Moholy, Marcel Moore, May Moore, Mina Moore, Barbara Morgan, Hedda Morrison, Ann Newmarch, Ruth Orkin, Marion Post Wolcott, Leonie Reisberg, Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson, Isabel Seymour, Peggy Silinsky, Eve Sonneman, Varvara Stepanova, Grete Stern, Elsa Thiemann, Tokiwa Toyoko, Ingeborg Tyssen, Edna Walling, Francesca Woodman, Yamawaki Michiko, Yamazawa Eiko.