The Woman Who Never Existed or On the Subject

In this monograph essay on rising star and photographic artist Anja Niemi, Max Houghton reconfigures the concept of the male gaze. She focuses on how the female body is reclaimed as a means for experiencing emotion in Niemi's self-portraiture, rather than an object upon which (male) pleasure might be enacted. In this psychoanalytically influenced study, Houghton explores the borders between self and other, the double, and the performance of gender, ultimately situating the work that constitutes In Character as a poetics of isolation.