Opening the book…
By the 1960s and 1970s, photography was doing something that would have felt deeply uncomfortable to earlier generations of formalist critics: it was giving up the fantasy of being only a finished image and becoming, instead, a witness to action. In this shift, the photograph was often no longer the final destination. It became a record of something staged, temporary, embodied, and sometimes deliberately unstable. That matters because performance art, body art, and conceptual practice all pushed artists to ask what happens when the real site of meaning is not the print on the wall, but the act, gesture, intervention, or presence that the camera only partially preserves.¹
This is where the body becomes central. In earlier photographic traditions, the body was often treated as subject matter—something to pose, categorize, idealize, eroticize, or document. In the 1960s and 1970s, many artists began using the body differently: as site, medium, instrument, and argument. The body could carry the marks of gender, race, labor, sexuality, violence, ritual, exile, surveillance, and power. It could become a stage for identity, but also a place where identity was shown to be unstable, performed, and politically charged. Photography was crucial here because it could hold onto the trace of an action after the action itself had disappeared. The camera did not simply capture the body; it helped turn bodily presence into an archive of meaning.²
That idea changes how we understand photographic authorship. When the photograph records a performance, it is not always claiming to be a self-sufficient masterpiece. It may be fragmentary, after-the-fact, or intentionally incomplete. It may document a live action that only a handful of people witnessed. It may preserve an intervention in public space that would otherwise vanish. In that sense, the photograph becomes both evidence and translation. It tells us something happened, but it also reminds us that what happened exceeded the image. That tension—between event and record, body and trace, action and image—is one of the most important features of photography in this period.³
It’s also worth saying plainly: this wasn’t one single “performance style.” The body could be used as confrontation, as ritual, as critique, as disguise, as endurance, as parody, as protest, or as survival. In feminist performance, the body often became the battleground where representation, agency, and the politics of looking were fought out in real time. In other contexts—especially under censorship or authoritarian pressure—performance and its documentation became a way to produce meaning without relying on institutions that could shut you down. This is one reason photography becomes so important: even when a performance is ephemeral, the photographic record allows it to circulate, to be remembered, and to become part of public history.
Ana Mendieta’s Silueta works make the body-as-trace idea vivid. Tate describes Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico) as a work in which Mendieta’s silhouette is inscribed into the landscape, and its broader materials emphasize that her Silueta films and related works place the body into earth, fire, grass, mud, and stone as both presence and absence.⁴ In Mendieta’s practice, the body is there and not there at the same time. It appears as an outline, a cavity, a flame, a mark in the land. That matters because the image does not simply show a person standing before the camera. It shows a body translated into trace—ritualized, temporary, and vulnerable to disappearance.
Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico), 1974/1976.
Mendieta’s work is powerful because it ties performance, photography, and identity together without reducing any of them to a simple label. Tate’s exhibition materials stress that her Silueta works explore body, nature, and spiritual connection, while also emerging from her experience of displacement.⁵ That sense of exile matters. The body here is not just personal expression. It is also a negotiation with belonging, memory, gender, and loss. Photography becomes the means by which that fragile negotiation survives. Without the photograph, the action is gone. With the photograph, it remains visible—but only as a trace of something already vanished.
But Mendieta is part of a wider conversation in these decades about how the body enters representation—and fights back. Consider VALIE EXPORT, whose performance Action Pants: Genital Panic (and its afterlife through photographic memorialization) is a blunt reminder that the body can be used to interrupt spectatorship itself. MoMA notes that EXPORT’s action was “memorialized” in a photograph made the following year by Peter Hassmann, and that EXPORT later circulated the image in screenprint form.⁶ That detail matters: the work doesn’t just “happen” once. It becomes an image-object that travels—exactly the kind of loop between action, documentation, and reproduction that defines this era.
VALIE EXPORT with Peter Hassmann (photographer), Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969
If EXPORT brings confrontation, Carolee Schneemann brings the body as text—literally. Interior Scroll (1975) survives for most students not as an experience they were present for, but as photographic sequence and documentation. The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art describes a portfolio of sequential photographs documenting the live performance in East Hampton in 1975.⁸ That kind of documentation turns performance into a readable visual record: you don’t just hear that the work existed; you follow it through images, step by step. Here, the photograph becomes the medium through which the performance becomes teachable history.
Now, a related move happens when the body is performed not in a live room but inside the conventions of media itself. Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (late 1970s) are not performance documentation in the classic sense, but they are absolutely body-and-camera work: the artist stages herself as a series of recognizable “types,” then photographs those types as if they were stills from films that never existed. MoMA’s artist page notes that Sherman produced the Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) by putting on guises and photographing herself in various settings.⁹ That’s a huge shift for photography: the “truth” of the image is not about an external event; it’s about exposing how representation manufactures identity.
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, 1978.
A related but distinctly different example appears in Lotty Rosenfeld’s A Thousand Crosses on the Pavement (1979–80). MoMA identifies the work as a 16mm film transferred to video, and its accompanying scholarship explains that Rosenfeld carried out the action in Santiago by placing strips of white tape across the dashed center lines of a road, transforming traffic markings into a path of crosses under the Pinochet dictatorship.¹¹ This is performance, but it is also sign intervention, public art, and political defiance. Rosenfeld does not retreat into private symbolism. She acts directly in civic space, altering the visual language of order and circulation. The street becomes both stage and contested text.
Lotty Rosenfeld, A Thousand Crosses on the Pavement, 1979–80.
What makes Rosenfeld so important is that the camera here does not merely document a private action. It preserves a challenge to authoritarian space. In MoMA’s post essay on the work, Jason Dubs explains how Rosenfeld’s intervention generated a charged social sign and emphasizes the dictatorship context that shaped the work’s risk and meaning.¹² The body is not only expressive; it is exposed. Performance is not only aesthetic; it is dangerous. Photography and film become essential because they allow the action to circulate beyond the moment of its making. The camera transforms a temporary gesture into a political afterlife.
If we zoom out, we can see how global this body-and-camera turn really is. In some places, the studio becomes a stage for self-fashioning rather than a neutral portrait machine—Samuel Fosso’s early self-portraits, for example, are routinely described by museums as a lifelong project of self-fashioning that begins with youthful studio images in Bangui.¹³ In other places, the street becomes a stage. In others, the gallery becomes a site of embodied critique. Across these differences, the shared logic is clear: the body becomes a primary medium through which photography questions power—who gets seen, who gets believed, and who gets to define reality.
Taken together, these artists demonstrate that photography’s relationship to performance cannot be reduced to simple documentation. In Mendieta’s work, the body becomes trace, ritual, landscape, and memory. In Rosenfeld’s, bodily action becomes public intervention and political dissent. Schneemann turns the body into text, while Sherman and Fosso use performance before the camera to expose identity as something constructed rather than naturally given. Across these different practices, photography follows the body into sites of vulnerability, transformation, resistance, and self-invention. The resulting image does not replace the action. It gives that action an afterlife, allowing a temporary gesture to circulate, accumulate meaning, and enter history.
Footnotes
- “Conceptual Art.” Tate, n.d., www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/conceptual-art. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026.
- “The Body Is Present Even If in Disguise: Tracing the Trace in the Artwork of Nancy Spero and Ana Mendieta.” Tate Papers, no. 11, Spring 2009, www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/11/the-body-is-present-even-if-in-disguise-tracing-the-trace-in-the-artwork-of-nancy-spero-and-ana-mendieta. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026.
- “Ana Mendieta: ‘The Earth That Covers Us Speaks.’” Tate Modern, Tate, n.d., www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/ana-mendieta-earth-covers-us-speaks. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026.
- Mendieta, Ana. Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico). 1976. Tate, www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mendieta-untitled-silueta-series-mexico-t13357. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026.
- “Ana Mendieta: ‘The Earth That Covers Us Speaks.’” Tate Modern, Tate, n.d., www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/ana-mendieta-earth-covers-us-speaks. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026.
- “VALIE EXPORT, Peter Hassmann. Action Pants: Genital Panic. 1969.” The Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/collection/works/133675. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026. (The Museum of Modern Art)
- “Action Pants: Genital Panic.” Inside/Out, The Museum of Modern Art, 2 June 2010, www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2010/06/02/action-pants-genital-panic/. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026. (The Museum of Modern Art)
- “Interior Scroll.” Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art / Cornell University Library Digital Collections, 1975, digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:34577343. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026. (Cornell University Library)
- “Cindy Sherman.” The Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/collection/artists/5392. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026. (The Museum of Modern Art)
- Sherman, Cindy. Untitled Film Still #21. 1978. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/266784. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
- Rosenfeld, Lotty. A Thousand Crosses on the Pavement. 1979–80. The Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/collection/works/290211. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026.
- Dubs, Jason. “Disruption and Displacement: Lotty Rosenfeld’s Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento and Its Afterlife in Pinochet’s Chile.” post, The Museum of Modern Art, 7 July 2021, post.moma.org/disruption-and-displacement-lotty-rosenfelds-una-milla-de-cruces-sobre-el-pavimento-and-its-afterlife-in-pinochets-chile/. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026.
- “Self Portrait.” The Studio Museum in Harlem, www.studiomuseum.org/artworks/self-portrait. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026. (Studio Museum in Harlem)
- “Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21.” Smarthistory, smarthistory.org/cindy-sherman-untitled-film-still-21/. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026. (Smarthistory)
This page titled 14.7: Performance, the Body, and the Camera was last modified on Wed, 05 Aug 2026 02:40:24 GMT and is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by James William Moore.
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