Intersections of Gaze and Agency in Sotheby’s Auction Catalogs

Sydney Ellison, BFA ’22 Photography

School of Art

Intersections of Gaze and Agency in Sotheby’s Auction Catalogs is a fictional Sotheby’s catalog that contains three groups of images intended to criticize the history of the nude in art and the dichotomy between male and female nudes. Criticism is shown through my self- portraits as male nudes from art history, images from contemporary art similarly reclaiming female autonomy, and works selected from existing Sotheby’s catalogs in which male artists continue to perpetuate archaic ways of presenting female nudes.