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This photograph is from a series of nine self-portraits made in 1990, in which Gregory depicts fragments of her upper body, face and hands, playfully moving in and out of the frame. Through close-up confrontation with the photographic lens, she investigates concepts of beauty, femininity and politics associated with the portrayal of identity. Gregory said of this work: ''Autoportrait' was my response to the invisibility, beyond the exotic, of black women in British fashion and beauty images. Among all the self-portraits I've made, it’s the only series in which the body alone is its focus. The intention is to conjure up the mood of the catwalk – all fantasy and glamour – a world from which me and my kind had been almost totally excluded. The sub-Saharan black woman of the photographs, with her broad nose, large eyes and lips, is the distant, glamorous figure of unattainable beauty'.