Claude Cahun used self-portraits as a means of exploring the limits of gender identity, the body and the self. Her photographic work, often produced in collaboration with her partner Marcel Moore, depicts a shifting, elusive ‘I’ that rejects fixed categories. For Cahun, intimacy is not a fixed private sphere but a space for reinvention, cross-dressing and ambiguity. She photographed herself in drag, androgynous, sometimes fragile, sometimes provocative, constantly blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, public and private.

Cindy Sherman, who paid tribute to Cahun at the beginning of her career, pursued similar research but with a different approach. Since the 1970s, she has photographed herself in staged scenes in which she embodies female stereotypes from cinema, television and advertising. Through her series, she questions the construction of social and media identity. Unlike Cahun, Sherman erases her own intimacy by embodying roles, masks and characters. However, this distance creates a paradoxical form of intimacy: by never showing who she really is, she reveals the multiple facades that everyone adopts in their lives. Sherman questions the cultural construction of femininity and the way in which intimacy becomes a visual product, often coded and standardised.

For Cahun, it is an intimacy that is lived and offered as a poetic and political enigma. For Sherman, it is an intimacy dissolved in artifice, distanced in order to better deconstruct it. One blurs the boundaries of her real identity, the other erases them behind masks. Thus, Cahun and Sherman, each in their own way, redefine intimacy: not as an inner truth to be revealed, but as a space of metamorphosis where the gaze — especially that of the other — is always summoned, questioned, displaced.

Where Cahun deconstructs the patriarchal gaze through enigmatic stagings, Sherman uses the visual language of advertising and cinema to show how the image of women is shaped—and objectified—by the media. Both artists denounce, each in their own way, the standardisation of female identity and the female body. Cahun's work is now considered an essential reference in the history of performative self-portraiture, and Sherman is among those who have continued its critical momentum.