"The picture of the woman one loves
ought not to be only an image in which one smiles,
but an oracle one questions."

-Andre Breton

A Picture of a Woman is a creative project used to explore the relationship between visuality, gender and the illusion of a photograph. I use the camera to construct femininity as a performance, where the subject, the art and the viewer are in dialogue with each other. It is not only an artistic articulation but also a critical social work done through the vehicle of art. It exists at the intersection of feminist theory and photography, where the illusions of gender and the visual image are allowed to reflect upon each other.

Each photographic series, or vignette, works to illuminate gender as a construct and questions the ways in which visual experiences evolve into meaningful social behaviors that later become inscribed upon the body. The work reads like a story to manipulate the viewer into producing assumptions about the sex of the subject. By deceiving the gaze of the viewer, I hope to disrupt notions that gender is a pure expression of sexuality or biological sex; rather it exists as a construct and illusion. Furthermore, I am addressing how these illusions reinforce social norms that align gender to sexual bodies. By presenting each series in motion I am carefully controlling the way the work can be seen, drawing attention to the power visual images have to control us as individuals and a society.

Each of the four vignettes are titled using excerpts from this 1934 prose written by surrealist Andre Breton, while watching a woman from across the room in a café. I titled this work to challenge notions of the idealized woman. Therefore, these words not only embody one man's fascination with a woman, but a cultural fascination with a picture of a woman.

The complete written component of this work will be available in the library at San Francisco State University in May 2006.

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