Sunday Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 331

THE FEMALE FOCUS wmfm mary McCartney 'Migrant Mother' Nipomo California 1936 by Dorothea Lange Dorothea Lange is best known for her work documenting migrant agricultural workers during the Great Depression For me the impact a photograph can have is shown here We see three children on the brink of starvation clinging to their mother She has the quality of extraordinary strength How can she look so dignified you mink when she barely has enough food to feed her family? KOURTNEY ROY 'Penthouse Pool' 1961 bySlimAarons It was the colours that struck me when I first saw this: reds and pale yellows reflecting each other throughout the image from the flowers in the woman's bathing-cap to her red red lips to the cushions that take us around to the dishes on the table all perfectly set off by cool pale blue The photo invokes in me a sense of nostalgia and of memory lost I feel that somehow it is my picture those women anchored in another time yet beguiling in their luminously eternal afternoon LISE SARFATI 'Autoportrait' 1928 by Claude Cahun To take this photograph Cahun stood with the shutter release hidden in her collar She looks at the camera with ambiguity and uncertainty I am very drawn to the way she approached gender She understood it as a social and political construction and through her artistic practice she wanted to go beyond it She said 'Neutral is the only gender that suits me forever Cahun subverted the roles of her time She was rejected by her own circle of Surrealists as she didn't conform to the idea of woman as muse of which they were so fond Her body of work is playful agonised and magnificent Stella 57.