Claude Cahun was the first female photographer to devote most of her images production to the self-portrait. Her distinctive feature was that she used herself as a model to present a number of experiments with identity and gender – both as a reflection on her own search for an identity and as a comment on the social gender perception of the time.

Cahun staged herself beyond the familiar gender roles as an androgynous or transexual being in a surreal world. André Breton (1896-1966) and others admired her for the distinctive way she problematized female identity and the female gender. Her self-portraits are among the most important and radical expression of the re-examination of female identity in the 1930´s.