In Because Every Hair Is Different, Marlene Haring explores hair as a powerful physical marker of femininity and desirability. Beginning with the idea that long, fine, blond tresses are the quintessence of feminine beauty and pushing it to an absurd extreme, Haring transforms herself into a surrealistic creature. Her gesture, at once performance, installation, and photography, complicates the link between hair and beauty: potentially, hair is also burdensome and grotesque, demanding an endless investment of time and money.

Alexandra Croitoru’s double portraits blend cynical humor and deadpan formality, mimicking standard compositions for such images. In each example, the man is seated and looks away from the camera, while the artist stands behind him, touching his shoulder and staring into the lens. Croitoru’s stereotypically masculine companions here are Adrian Năstase, prime minister of Romania at the time this work was made (who was later tried and imprisoned for corruption), and a bodybuilder who trained at her local gym. Although her gestures and posture appear deferential, Croitoru’s gaze is defiant.

Milja Laurila’s inability to remember the time she spent living in Tanzania as a small child led her to explore the relationship between photography, memory, and identity—the way one can look at a photograph of oneself without recognition. In the series In Their Own Voice, Laurila asks what it means to be observed in different pictorial regimes. She transfers existing medical photographs of female subjects to transparent acrylic and groups them in horizontal arrangements. In this new context, free from the diagnostic gaze, the figures appear to come to life, regaining individuality and grace.

In her Vogue Series, Caroline Heider proposes that a folded photograph—typically considered damaged—can be “recycled” into art and critique. Heider foregrounds the role photography plays in advertising and fashion by repurposing magazine images, inserting a fold in them, and rephotographing the now-interrupted narrative. Her interventions halt the endless cycle of desire such images create by ensuring that the viewer can no longer consume the initial message.

In her Gestures of Demarcation works, Melanie Manchot portrays herself outside, naked, and looking at the lens. Another person, fully clothed and facing away from the camera, pinches and tugs her skin. As viewers, we are uncomfortable witnesses to the scene, forced to question the issue of public versus private space and the integrity of the individual within communal systems. “My work employs performative strategies to chart gestures, moments of transformation or personal rituals through which my subjects collaborate,” Manchot has said. “Gender issues, the body as a site of subjectivity, and cultural constructions of identity have been recurring themes.”

In her series Encounter, Silvia Rosi reenacts images from a “lost” family album, posing as either her mother or father and including details that represent their migration from Togo to Italy. Here, Rosi poses in front of a colorful backdrop that evokes the vibrant practice of West African studio portraiture. She is dressed as her father, and each element in the scene symbolizes an aspect of his life: the suit and tie signify his status as a professional man; the set of books atop Rosi’s head indicate that he is educated (following Togo tradition); and the tomatoes that surround her represent the dramatic change in status her father experienced upon arriving in Italy, where he first worked in the fields of a farm.

In 2002 the magazine Vogue Hommes invited Vanessa Beecroft to produce a series considering masculinity. This work depicts a naked model posed in a headstand, next to a clothed man—Beecroft’s brother—who stands upright. By staging the figures in front of Milan’s Palazzo di Giustizia (Palace of Justice), Beecroft references her brother’s profession in the field of law. He wears the clothing of contemporary status and power, while the woman hovers out of time and place, an idealized fantasy of subordinate beauty.

Bettina von Zwehl situates the photographic portrait within the long history of portraiture by referencing bygone stylistic approaches such as the painted miniature and the cut-paper silhouette. The Sessions comprises fifty silhouette portraits of the same young girl, with their edges torn to create irregular borders. The series presents multiple facets of one individual, with the variation of torn edges counterbalancing the inherent replicability of the silhouette format. Produced during the artist’s residency at the Sigmund Freud Museum in London, The Sessions reflects von Zwehl’s interest in psychoanalysis and the creative process.

Hannah Starkey makes large-scale photographs of women in public spaces by hiring actors or models to pose for her, then adding props and scouting architectural settings with symbolic resonances. By photographing women in ambiguous narratives—as in this cinematic scene, in which a pregnant woman stands waist-deep in water in front a large expanse of windows—Starkey questions the documentary nature of photography and its representation of gender. She often leaves her photographs untitled but includes the month and year in which the image was completed. While the choice to provide a date gives additional context, the meaning of the image remains open to interpretation.

Shirana Shahbazi makes photographs in traditionally European styles and genres—including still life, landscape, and, in this case, portraiture—questioning hierarchies and sometimes translating her images into different mediums. In Farsh132006, a photograph of a young woman’s head, reminiscent of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665), has been made into a hand-knotted carpet by artisans in Shahbazi’s native Iran. These multiple incarnations encourage us to consider the various ways signs can be rearranged and recycled today.

Uta Barth created this series while traveling in unfamiliar cities, hurrying along, often finding herself lost. She became interested in the things she noticed out of the corner of her eye, which caused her to “double take.” These two works depict the Tate Modern in London while the museum was under construction in 2000. As viewers shift their eyes from one point of scrutiny to the next, the image they have just been looking at—bits of reflected light—moves into the periphery.

Sigrid Viir produced this diptych for a solo exhibition in which she performed the act of creating a body of work. Twelve pairs of photographs represented the duration of the exhibition, with accent colors (pink, in the case of Day 1) corresponding to paint she applied to a sculptural object and pedestal in the gallery each day. Folding and manipulating her own self-portrait, Viir comments on the artist’s compulsion to replicate a style or self in relation to art world demands. At the same time, her challenge to the physical integrity of the photographs asks us to recognize them as tangible objects rather than immaterial images, in dialogue with each other and with architectural space.

In this two-part piece, Barbara Probst embraces multiple perspectives of a single moment. Each image is integrated into the narrative of the other while simultaneously unraveling it. In one photograph, the protagonist appears to be running from the camera, perhaps playfully; the aerial image of her on a rooftop, however, suggests more ominous surveillance. Probst reveals her process by regularly including her camera and tripod in her work, their presence either confirming the truth of the image or breaking it down. Triggering back-and-forth readings, Probst heightens our awareness of both the physical and psychological act of looking.

While pursuing an artistic career in Paris, Carolle Bénitah rediscovered family albums from her Moroccan childhood and began to reinterpret the images they contained. She selected, scanned, and made new prints of the original photographs, then embroidered patterns into them with bright red thread. The source photograph for Le déguisement was taken on the Jewish holiday Purim, when costumes are often worn. Bénitah echoed this tradition by stitching veils over each child’s face and allowing loose ends to pool at the bottom of the frame.

Ulla Jokisalo uses found photographs—from popular magazines, vintage family albums, and other sources—as the points of departure for her carefully handcrafted assemblages. She then sews, manipulates, and otherwise fashions dimensional compositions that unite her personal memories and associations with a surreal world of fairy tale figures and gender-redefined creatures. The title of this work is a reference to T. S. Eliot’s iconic poem “The Waste Land” (1922), in which a large cast of narrators continually upends our sense of reality.

Yto Barrada made Papiers Pliés by collecting the recycled paper wrappings used by vendors of snack foods—chickpeas, peanuts, sunflower seeds—in Perdicaris Park in Tangier, Morocco, then folding the detritus into geometric forms and photographing it. The printed French words taille (size) and expédition (shipment) indicate the sheets’ original function as forms from a textile factory and allude to Morocco’s past as a French colony (1912–56). Focusing on documents transformed first into food containers, then into trash, and finally into art, Barrada brings attention to dynamics between Western nations and the global South.

The work is part of Natalie Czech’s Poems by Repetition series, in which the artist recreates poems by well-known twentieth-century authors by highlighting or hiding prose on printed ephemera and consumer goods—from iPads and magazine articles to album covers and overdrive pedals. Here, three photographs of the top portion of the thirtieth-anniversary album cover for Pink Floyd’s hit 1973 song “Money” create Aram Saroyan’s minimalist poem “ney/mo/money.” Foregrounding both the inherent reproducibility of the photographic medium and employing techniques of repetition similar to those used by poets, the series blurs the boundaries between writing and photography.

Having grown up in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia, Eva Kot’átková creates collages, performances, and site-specific installations that explore the individual’s relationship to social structures and institutions such as hospitals and schools. These three vignettes depict confrontations between silhouetted figures, some of whom wield devices inspired by the artist’s research in the archives of local institutions, like the Psychiatric Hospital Bohnice outside of her native Prague. Kot’átková also draws on the aesthetics of twentieth-century Czech surrealism (such as Emila Medková’s Shadowplay photographs from the late 1940s), absurdist literature, and books on psychology, medicine, and social science.

Iris Hutegger has described her stitched photographs as “real images of fiction.” While hiking in the mountainous region of Switzerland where she lives, Hutegger takes color photographs that she prints in black and white. She then assigns the images numbers, removing their geographical specificity, and uses her sewing machine to insert foliage that could never appear in reality. The emotional dimension of the stitching is twofold: it adds imagined color and life and shifts our sense of scale from a vast mountainous expanse to a minutely patterned surface.

Staged deep in a forest in eastern Poland, this photograph depicts a member of a fictional utopian cult in the process of “devolving” into a tree—rejecting Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in favor of plant life. In the series Modern Life of the Soul, Melanie Bonajo and Kinga Kiełczyńska capture nature’s beauty and mystery at the same time as they satirize our tendency to romanticize it, particularly in relation to gender and nationalism.

While living in London, Elisa Sighicelli made a number of lightbox works inspired by the Renaissance art on display at the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena. Looking past the paintings’ dense content, Sighicelli examined the background scenery and extracted passages of charming natural detail and painterly freedom; here we see a horizontal slice of the lower portion of Benvenuto di Giovanni’s Ascension. She then mounted the photographic print on translucent acrylic, the reverse side of which she selectively painted black, so the fluorescent light illuminates only the sky. The variable light emanating from behind the image gives it dimensionality and flow, creating a dreamlike scene.

“My work explores the idea of imagined threat and response, and looks at fear and planning for the unexpected, merging fact and fiction, fantasy and reality,” says Sarah Pickering. In her series Explosion, Pickering shows the English countryside violently disrupted by mines, artillery, and other weapons. On closer inspection, we see that these are small-scale simulated explosions, of the type used in military and police training exercises and special effects. Possessing the pyrotechnic allure of a magic trick, Land Mine is also a warning: in an image-centric culture, we can too easily admire simulations while forgetting the destructive capacities of arsenals maintained by governments and other entities around the world.

Twin sisters Jane and Louise Wilson have spent three decades photographing sites that shaped twentieth-century European history. Sea Eagle is part of a series of large-scale photographs depicting Nazi bunkers built along the coastline from Spain to Norway during World War II. The Brutalist structures survive, though they are now crumbling into the sea. Looming over the viewer and thus assuming some of the bunker’s original hateful power, this black-and-white photographic document asks whether the ideology the building represents should be fetishized, conserved, or destroyed.