The Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl Collection of European Women Photographers 2000-2020

This is the first publication to comprehensively explore art collector and philanthropist Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl's collection of work by European women photographers. One of the largest of its kind, the collection comprises 220 works by nearly 90 emerging and established women photographers from 17 countries in Western and Eastern Europe. Covering photo-based art made between 2000 and 2020, Haukohl's eclectic selection questions traditional notions of nation, identity and gender, with an emphasis on representations of the body and associated themes of beauty, femininity and objectification. Artists including Yto Barrada, Uta Barth, Carolle Bénitah, Melanie Bonajo, Vanessa Beecroft, Valerie Berlin, Natalie Czech, Eva Kotátková, Vera Lutter, Josephine Pryde and Shirana Shahbazi employ wide-ranging materials and conceptual approaches to expand our changing understandings of what constitutes womanhood, Europe (for many, in the context of the legacy of Soviet rule), and the medium of photography itself.

Rebecca Mark is the director of the Institute for Women's Leadership and a professor in the Department of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. Her research addresses southern cultural studies, particularly representations of memory and trauma, and her books include The Dragon's Blood: Feminist Intertextuality in Eudora Welty's Fiction (1994) and Ersatz America: Hidden Traces, Graphic Texts, and Mending of Democracy (2014). Mark's honors include the Eudora Welty Prize, the Public Humanities Achievement Award from the Mississippi Humanities Council and the Weiss Presidential Fellowship.