“Daphne metamorfoos X” by Luts Karin – Tartu Art Museum, Estonia

On the occasion of Women’s History Month, Photoconsortium has published a new blogpost on Europeana that gives a look at women transforming themselves in self-portraits to fight for gender rights during the ’70s and the ’80s.

Self-portraits are, in the modern era, a way for women to assert control over the perception others have of them, especially in a society where the representation of women is often mediated by the male gaze in art, cinema, and media.

The ancient Roman poet Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” depicted women turning into elements of the natural world: plants, rocks, animals. By the ’70s and ’80s, self-portraits became tools that allowed women to redefine themselves through transformation: they changed their appearance through self-representation as a reflection of significant societal change. They played with the metamorphosis that society had historically imposed on them: turning women into objects of male desire and stereotype.

Read about Carolee Schneemann, Libera Mazzoleni and other women transforming themselves in self-portraits on our new blogpost: When self-portraits become metamorphosis