Angela Grauerholz: La femme 100 tetes / The Hundred Headless Woman

La femme 100 tetes / 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 tetes 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.

Apprehending the face’s image becomes a mode of possession. We are surrounded by the image of the woman’s face, the obsession of the portrait and the covergirl alike. The face is what belongs to the other. It is unavailable to the woman herself. Susan Stewar