La femme 100 têtes / The Hundred Headless Woman

La femme 100 têtes / The Hundred Headless Woman presents over 150 portraits of 100 women—some acquaintances, some strangers—taken by Angela Grauerholz over a 30-year period and presented for the first time in this book. Collaging diverse photos made with various cameras and technologies with text fragments from a range of mostly female authors, Grauerholz creates a hybrid between a magazine and book that forms a complex portrait of women. The title La femme 100 têtes is borrowed from Max Ernst’s 1929 Surrealist collage novel of the same name, in which he combined cut-up and reassembled nineteenth-century illustrations with bizarre captions. Grauerholz welcomes the double entendre of Ernst’s title—when read aloud in French it means both “the hundred-headed woman” and “the headless woman”—to create a sense of womanhood intricately individual and violently anonymous. The intentionally quotidian nature of Grauerholz’s photos blurs the “class” distinctions between images in an art context, in a printed publication and on the Internet, and tests the changing ways we encounter and judge photography.