Erotic images where women turn their lens on women

This Saturday, Soho’s Claire de Rouen hosts Dark Summer, a series of erotic image nights described as a fun but serious exploration of our contemporary relationship to sexuality, the body and gender. Its third instalment will focus on the female gaze and some of the photographers who have famously turned their lens on themselves or the women around them – with guests able to purchase items from the edit. Curated alongside Vickie Biggs, below founder Lucy Kumara Moore talks us through five of her favourites ahead of the event.

LENA C EMERY, RIE, PUBLISHED BY KOMINEK

“Images of naked or semi-naked women taken by a woman – the gaze is female here, but is it erotic? Emery’s pictures of young Japanese girls, made in Tokyo, depict a shifting set of relations – there are moments when the girls seem very conscious of their nakedness, their sexuality and the camera, at others less so. By making these pictures, Emery reveals women in the act of presenting their bodies – making them available to our gaze. Private shifts to public across the pages of Rie. This is fascinating to me because I think sexuality is constructed through a shared cultural language, not in isolation – for example, in the moments of seeing and being seen – and Rie evinces this process.”

LINA SCHEYNIUS, BOOK 09, SELF-PUBLISHED

“Scheynius makes super beautiful all-white, little softcover books – this is number nine in the series and they always sell out. She turns the camera onto herself, and what I like is how much she is aware of the tropes of this self-reflective activity. You know that moment in Lost in Translation when Scarlett Johansson says she went through a photography phase and took pictures of her feet? Lina takes that coming-of-age mood that all women feel and pushes through it into a totally original language that is honest and open.”

MAISIE COUSINS, A TRIO OF LIMITED EDITION PRINTS COMMISSIONED BY CLAIRE DE ROUEN

“I curate Dark Summer with my friend Vickie Biggs and she is a huge fan of Maisie’s work. We are so honoured that Maisie has made some limited edition prints for Claire de Rouen. I’m going to quote her instead of me now! She says: ‘I think about the gendered gazes less and less as I become more of my own artist, I think it was a starting place that stemmed from being angry and wanting to act against things like advertising and gross sexist fashion photography. It was more about wanting to create things I wanted to see that validated myself as a person. It was unintentionally political.’”

CLUNIE REID, FAKER DRINKER SOLDIER HEIRESS, PUBLISHED BY BOOK WORKS

“Faker Drinker Soldier Heiress is a glossy mirrored sci-fi-esque screen beauty of a book. Reid is a totally now British contemporary artist, whose photo-collages warp the imagery of advertising to an extreme. Her processes are aggressively DIY/Punk in their aesthetic and work to destabilise the dominant mechanics of consumerism, desire, beauty and sexuality.”

COLLIER SCHORR, JENS F, PUBLISHED BY STEIDLMACK

“Jens F is a landmark book – Schorr’s first (made in 2005), it marks a turning point in the examination of gender in relation to the gaze. In Jens F, Schorr responds to a series of paintings a woman by a male artist – The Helga Pictures by American painter Andrew Wyeth. Schorr makes a group of photographs, drawings and collages that show a young German man called Jens mirroring many of the poses that Wyeth asked Helga to adopt, and which collectively explore how desire is constructed through visual tropes. On page 113, in beautiful softly scrawled pencil, Schorr writes: ‘There is a short history of portraiture of boys/men so you don’t inherit so many references, but when you photograph the female nude, suddenly history comes crashing in.’ 8 Women is another book by Schorr that is so important in the contemporary discourse around the performance of gender (read Judith Butler on this!), eroticism and visuality. I launched it at Claire de Rouen in 2014.”

Dark Summer takes place Saturday 25 March from 6-8 at Clare de Rouen and is a collaboration with Vickie Biggs. This edition is supported by MARIEYAT