Visualizing Bodies: Photography’s Role in the Embodied Creations of Tourmaline’s and Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s Portraits

This paper explores trans relationships to self-representation through photography. In analyzing Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s work alongside Tourmaline’s contemporary self-portraits, my thesis situates these visual creations as acts of creating a body. I argue that the act of imagining a body and its environment forms a sense of embodiment, and that photography allows for temporary visual trans bodily imaginings that creates physical embodiments. Cahun and Moore’s series of portraits use the medium of photography to claim all of the gendered explorations as potentials their bodies hold. Tourmaline’s self-portraits define a space and body that are interdependent, and care for Black trans legacies, presents, and futures. These artists use visualizations not to depict what embodiment is, but to extend embodiment to what can be, while acknowledging these experiences as unstable, plural, or malleable.

My analysis uses Tourmaline’s series of self-portraits exhibited at Chapter NY, and portraits from Cahun and Moore’s series of photographs taken by Moore documenting Cahun as subject. I use methods of visual analysis and theories of phenomenology to understand how these visual creations create a body in relationship to an environment through acts of witnessing and representation. This work holds photography as a medium that allows for these visual embodiments. By photographing an imagined body, these artists find alternatives to a fixed body or understanding of gender, while operating within a medium defined by proof. One of the purposes of this essay is to approach proof of a body or gender as a complicated negotiation between self-determination and external understandings, while also holding the aspects of the work which contradicts itself.

Cahun and Moore and Tourmaline’s work position bodies as dependent on environments. The body and setting define each other, and these works highlight the impact of external forces onto a perceived self or identity. Through techniques of exposure, clothing, and pose. Cahun and Moore create versions of a body with contours and boundaries that are not fixed. The environment makes and simultaneously unmakes their body throughout the series. Tourmaline’s work emphasizes historical impacts and acts of imaging futures through clothing and interaction between herself as a subject and the environment. Tourmaline’s portraits reference Black trans legacies and freedom dreaming by historical figures, to imagine a new environment that allows for Black trans subjects to not only exist safely, but rest.

Experimenting with representing a body or self through photography is central to the aspect of visualizing embodiments that these portraits hold for Cahun and Moore and Tourmaline. The imagined selves in these works hold radical potentials, and the artists draw out how embodiment is formed by what Cahun once called the visual “rough sketch[es] of a body and soul.”