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Fashioning Femininities juxtaposes the ways in which early male photographers constructed views of femininity with the pioneering auto-fiction of the Countess of Castiglione. It proposes that whilst male photographers explored tropes and types, the Countess used her agency to deconstruct these roles to produce something more performative and also more psychologically penetrating.

Running through the exhibition is the dialogue between early photography and the canon of painting. Many of the early photographers began as painters as this multi-media practice is exemplified by the , painting, …