The long-awaited and comprehensive catalogue accompanying the Estonian Museum of Photography’s main exhibition of the year of the body, Gendered Lens, has been released.

The book bears the full title Gendered Lens. Body, Gender, and Sexuality in the History of Photography in Estonia from the Late 19th Century to the Early 2000s, clearly signalling its broad historical and thematic scope.

How have the body, gender, and sexuality been represented in the history of Estonian photography? Exploring this question reveals a visual history in which the boundaries between documentary and staged photography, as well as between intimacy and the public sphere, are often blurred. Photography has always operated within the tension between truth and construction. Gendered Lens invites viewers to reconsider the history of photography – from late 19th-century studio portraits to the boundary-pushing photographic art of the 1990s – not merely as a sequence of images or interpretations, but as a stage on which gender, identity, and the gaze are continuously redefined.

The catalogue presents an extensive study of the gendered and sexualised body, bringing together diverse perspectives on the history of Estonian photography. The contributions of the co-authors play a central role. Katrin Kivimaa examines both the tradition of the female nude and the radical shifts in bodily and gender representation in 1990s photographic art. Mari-Liis Sepper explores aesthetic, ethical, and political approaches to reading historical pornography, highlighting images created across different periods despite taboos and prohibitions. Andreas Kalkun foregrounds the potential for queer interpretations in archival photographs, while Harry Liivrand analyses the explosive emergence of erotic visual culture at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Together, these texts create a multifaceted field of vision in which the histories of art, society, and intimacy intersect.

The catalogue is further enriched by an essay by curator Annika Haas, Body and Gender in Art History and Estonian Photographic Art, as well as interviews with artists Ly Lestberg, Sirje Runge, Liina Siib, Mark Raidpere, and Toomas Volkmann. These conversations offer insight into the artists’ creative processes and stand alongside the works of all participating artists, forming part of a broader and ongoing dialogue.

In this way, the catalogue becomes a significant extension of the exhibition itself, inviting readers to approach body photography not merely as documentation but as a field of playful, layered, and often contradictory interpretations.

The catalogue was compiled by the exhibition’s curator Annika Haas, designed by Indrek Sirkel, linguistically edited by Klaire Kolmann, and translated into English by Maris Karjatse.

The photographs reproduced in the book originate primarily from the collections and archives of the Estonian Museum of Photography, but also from other memory institutions as well as artists’ and private collections. More than half of the images are published for the first time, and several works rediscovered during the research process prompt a reconsideration of the history of Estonian photography.

The book is available for purchase at the Estonian Museum of Photography and in the Tallinn City Museum online shop:

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The production of the exhibition and the catalogue texts was supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.