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Since the mid-eighties, when Anne Ferran commenced her career as a photographer, her work has focused consistently upon the symbolic and historical presence of women. Her series 'Carnal Knowledge' (1984) and the 'Scenes on the Death of Nature' which followed two years later, established her intention of retrieving the past, metaphorically, to prompt alternative readings and representations of the female. These subtle, transgressive bodies of work intentionally evaded any fixed feminist reading of sexuality and the female body and of issues pertaining to women. The first group of these gelatin silver prints were intimate portraits, reminiscent of the work of Julia Margaret Cameron, the nineteenth century photographer who composed her models partly in emulation of pre-raphaelite paintings. In Ferran's portraits, youthful female beauty was camouflaged by a weathered surface of stone veiling the faces- 'frozen' as a vestige of the past. The problematic signs of femininity, here, became distanced from the gaze and allowed us to reconsider the domain of carnal knowledge and desire, without privileging masculine experience.
The second group, 'Scenes', recalled neo-classical sculptural reliefs and also the genre of Victorian theatrical tableaux. However, importantly, Ferran's appropriations denied any narrative content we might have expected. Her project concerning the feminine has always closely challenged conventional photographic codes. In the 'Scenes', compositions of sensuously draped figures in languid states of repose were not depictions of a mythological event or of a fantasy world. Cropped and discontinuous in their sequential arrangement, they were of anonymous figures, linked by folds of cloth and bodily gesture. The weight and grace of the body was emphasised in these images which stringently followed aesthetic rules of constraint and composure. "No extreme of pain or pleasure