Frequently Cited Works:

Carol Armstrong, "Florence Henri: A Photographic Series of 1928: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall," History of Photography vol. 18, no. 3 (Autumn), 1994: 223–228.

Diana C. Du Pont, Florence Henri: Artist-Photographer of the Avant Garde. San Francisco Museum of Art, 1990.

Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), trans. by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.

Rosalind E. Krauss, "Jump Over the Bauhaus," October 15 (Winter), 1980: 103–110.

Rosalind Krauss, "The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism," October 19 (Winter 1981), 3–34. Also reproduced in The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.

Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I," Écrits, trans. by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957 (1929).

Notes:

1. She used methods and means attributable to other types of expression to produce "an anamorph of reality." Giuseppe Marcenaro, "Ragioni di una mostra," Florence Henri, Florence Henri: Aspetti di un percorso 1910--1940, Banco di Chiaveri, Genoa, 1979, 23.

2. Du Pont, 10.

3. Biographical details come from Du Pont and Giovanni Battista Martini and Alberto Ronchetti, Florence Henri: 1927--1938, Lugano, Italy, Il Muséo Cantonale d'Arte.

4. Based on several interviews she had conducted with the photographer's surviving friends, Diana C. Du Pont has confirmed that Henri was bisexual (private conversation, 16 November, 1994). Du Pont has declined to name the individuals or make public the interviews.

5. I use this denotation to describe the intellectual activity of these works, and in no manner do I intend to connote sexual acts or choices.

6. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, "Photography is a Manipulation of Light," in Eugene Prakapas, Bauhaus Photography, trans. by Harvey L. Mendelsohn (Bauhaus Fotografie, Dusseldorf, Edition Marzona, 1982),Cambridge, MIT press, 1985, 126--29.

7. Ibid, 127.

8. Ibid, 128.

9. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, (1927) 1969.): Photographs by George Muche, pp. 100, 103, and Moholy-Nagy, 101.

10. Ibid, 31.

11. Ibid.

12. See Melody Davis, "Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique and the Culture of Fetishization," Millennium Film Journal, no. 28, (Spring 1995): 108-121.

13. All photographs are reproduced in Du Pont, with the exception of figs. 6 and 7, which are noted in the text.

14. This is reproduced in Henri, 1979 (as in note 1).

15. For a comprehensive listing, see Du Pont. Highlights include: the legendary "Fotografie der Gegenwart" exhibition in Essen, 1929; "Film und Foto," Stuttgart, of the same year, in which Henri exhibited twenty-one photographs; Foto-Auge, edited by Roh and Tschichold, a one-person exhibition in Paris, Studio 28, 1930; "Foreign Advertising Photography," New York, 1931; and shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Royal Photographic Society, London; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Kunst-industrimuseum, Copenhagen. Her commercial photography, begun in 1929 to supplement her income after the world economic depression, was frequently published in Parisian journals: Arts et Métiers Graphiques, Vogue, Photographie, The New York Herald, and Lilliput. Her work also found its way into German and Italian journals such as Gebrauchsgrafik, Stile futurista, and Für die Frau (Frankfurter Zeitung für Mode und Gesellschaft).

16. Henri occasionally inverted or turned photographs on their side for effect, as one can tell by studying separate prints of the same image in differing collections.

17. Martini and Ronchetti (as in note 7), plate 12.

18. Ibid, plate 50.

19. Henri frequently retouched prints to downplay ther constructed nature or to highlight or darken a tonal value.

20. Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold, Foto-Auge, Arno Press, New York, 1973 (reprint of 1929 Stuttgart exhibition catalogue).

21. Henri, 1979 (as in note 1), 29. Translation from the Italian with the assistance of Barbara Casavecchia.

22. This perspicacious argument, shedding light on Henri's work, does, however, run into difficulties with its use of Irigaray, since that philosopher, far from translating Lacan's mirror stage into female terms, thoroughly refutes it. In Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), mirroring is a narcissistic and masculine activity, and mirrors are the female's enforced role, in effect denying the existence of women but as a foil for masculine self-absorption. Irigaray calls for a concave mirror, or speculum, which turns light inward with an incendiary intensity, irradiating and eradicating the subject, which is, in Western thought, masculine. At the same time, this speculum/mirror would allow for woman's position and speech. From these metaphors some questions arise which Irigaray does not concern herself with answering, since her text aims to produce a hystericized discourse that will render or disrupt the tradition of thought (which is all thought) that seeks to eradicate woman. Is the speculum/concave mirror which is capable in its lethal intensity of destroying the subject/man also capable of burning woman into which it is, after all, turned? And how does the feminine subject even begin to think if she doesn't exist in Western thought but in non-subjectivized terms (as an "other," and as nothing)?--a question which her essay on Descartes brilliantly problematizes. Furthermore, how can an Irigaray-derived image even exist but as destruction, a bonfire of images, a space where all specularity and all language is, more than questioned, sent up in smoke? Her speculum/concave mirror directs light rays not to any source, but all together so that they combust. Ultimately, the Irigarayan program is to destabilize, not to provide images.

23. Armstrong critiques this image as presenting a feminine "reproduced object and the reproducing surface of the specular system" (227).

24. Martini and Ronchetti (as in n. 7) identify him as "Charly." Armstrong believes him to be Henri's friend, Prampolini. Since Martini and Ronchetti have conducted extensive interviews with Henri in order to solicit biographical information, I have privileged their identification.

25. "Florence Henri," Camera (Luzerne, Switzerland), no. 9 (Sept. 1967), 11.

26. For concepts of the "New Woman" and Henri, see Du Pont, 39-40; for the "New Woman" in Weimar, Germany, see Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, "Beyond Kinder, Küche, Kirche: Weimar Woman in Politics and Work," R. Bridenthal, et. al., eds., When Biology Became Destiny, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1984, 33-63. For Left Bank avant-gardism, see Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris: 1900-1940, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1986. This study is essential scholarship for issues of gay and bi life in Parisian literary circles of the time.

27. See Laurie Schneider Adams, "Ms. Medusa: Transformations of a Bisexual Image," The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, no 9, 1976, 105-152.

28. Zauber des Spiegels: Geshichte und Bedeutung des Spiegels in Der Kunst, R. Piper and Co., Munich, 1951.

29. Benstock, 13.

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