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.