Articulating the unspeakable : the feminist photography of Julie Rrap and Anne Ferran

![CDATA[Photographs from the 1980s by Julir Rrap and Anne Ferran in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection embody a number of significant shifts in Australian art during that decade. Studio-based, highly manipulated and large scale, the works evidence a strong contemporary development in photography towards a self-consciously painterly approach, as opposed to a more 'naturalist' approach. They were clearly influenced by the post-structuralist cultural theories of the period, and they exemplify certain feminist strategies - concerned primarily with the formation of gender identities through the representation and affirmation of sexual difference - that came to supplant those of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. This feminist dimension is essential to an understanding of both the creation (the artists' processes and intent) and the reception (the critical discourses to which they contributed) of these works. Moreover, to appreciate the works' feminist aspect, it is necessary to understand the theory that informed them.]]