are erased with retouching; robbed of its sensory organs, the face demonstrates the sheer inability to live. Inez van Lamsweerde shows individual people – or better figures – such as «Sasja» or the guys in series «The Forest» against a neutral, white background. Van Lamsweerde maintains all of the formal qualities common to fashion photography, from the made-up faces and puppet-like entrance of the figures to the cool and glossy aesthetics – a cliché twisted in the greatest sense of the word. Her body images are, in part, hybrid combinations made up of men, women, and children whose suggested physicality irritates: men are given the hands of women, children the jawbones of adult males. The people photographed here become hybrid beings. Their ambivalence turns them into modern icons, or worse, into the ugly mugs of a highly-civilized western existence.

«I is an Other»

The following women photographers deal with the body in a totally different manner. They reflect personal identity itself, which appears as simply an expression in the image. Whether Vibeke Tandberg or

Mitra Tabrizian, while these artists use digital intervention possibilities in the photographic image, they make less of a display of such processes than the already presented artists, who explicitly confront the post-human debate. The following images are less concerned with a drastic physicality; they focus instead on interpersonal communication processes and the definition of one’s own self.

In her current works the Norwegian Vibeke Tandberg, while exploring her theme of identity and sexual roles, also distorts her body and shortens its appendages with electronic interventions. Unlike Lamsweerde, in the series «Undo,» Tandberg intervenes in the image of herself as a woman already several months pregnant and exaggerates the proportions of this physicality. Parallel to this, she casts herself in the series «Old man going up and down a staircase» as an older man, indirectly equating the awkwardness of her pregnant body with an older person’s dwindling ability to move. In the context of examining a subject, additive procedures are just as important as deformation strategies. Bettina Hoffmann stages what appear to be everyday scenes in «affaires infinies»