Beatrice’s photographs make subsumed tensions evident; whether between generations of her aristocratic Swedish family, or between her own unclad, “natural” form and the rigors of hierarchy that qualify her identity.
 
Self-representation by women photographers has taken a conceptual shift in the last few decades. A 1945 self-portrait by Diane Arbus (1923-1971)—a photographer known for often focusing on groups on the borders of perceived normality (nudists, giants)—shows the artist pregnant in white underwear, aged 22, posed alongside her camera. While the pieces’ aesthetic is highly personal—lending to our viewing an aspect of voyeurism—the photograph itself is a witting object, destined for exhibition in the public sphere. Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) shoots self-portraits that explore the idea of “the gaze”; a concept popularly asserted by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) to indict the subject-object power relationships inherent in viewing. British film theorist Laura Mulvey (b. 1941) added gender analysis to Lacan’s psychoanalytic framework in her 1973 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Sherman’s The One series, taken between 1978 and 1980, has Sherman modeling herself after film stills of (often distressed) iconic actresses.
 
Further parsing of spheres public and private is evident in the recent work of French artist Sophie Calle (b. 1953), who is also a writer and conceptual installation artist. Calle’s photography enacts and documents intrusions into cloistered identities and spaces. Flipping between roles as subject and trespasser, Calle plays with liminal space by employing classic methods of surveillance and forensic analysis upon herself; the stranger.