Claude Cahun

The picture above is a self-portrait by the artist Claude Cahun. I assumed from the name and from the image that the artist was a male. Not so, Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob had many different pseudonyms throughout her early life, but settles on the name Claude Cahun. She is from France, perhaps in France, the name Claude is for both men and women?
Cahun did mostly self-portraits. Her style is very theatrical, often dressing up in a mask, having strange make-up and, when she had hair, strange hair (she shaved her head and kept it cropped short for the rest of her life).
Her lifetime partner, Marcel Moore (also a pseudonym), was also an artists, and I will guess that they often worked together. But this assumption comes from the fact that when I googled Marcel Moore, many of the same pictures of Cahun came up.
Together the two artists moved to the island Jersey, which evidently shocked the avant-garde community (haha) because they left the artistically rich environment of the city. They worked isolated for the rest of their lives, secretly creating flyers protesting the war and the Germans, throwing them in cars or dressing up as German, entering German events, and placing them on chairs and tables. The two were put in jail for these acts and sentenced to death. Thankfully the sentence was never completed, but Claude died from from illnesses due to imprisonment.

The contemporary photographer, Joel Peter Witkin, has a similar process, I think, to Cahun. Although his subject matter is very different. Early on in his career, he was a war photographer, but later he began to photograph things he would set up himself, many of which are obviously composites (for example, a centaur). His subject matter ranges from dismemberment to transvestites to dwarves. His choice of subject matter comes from an incident that happened outside his house when a car accident decapitated a little girl.