In her Strip series, 1999, Stehli invited prominent figures from the London art world -critics, curators and dealers - to watch her strip naked whilst they kept hold of the camera’s release cable and chose their moment to take the pictures. The resulting photographs show the artist from behind in varying states of undress, with her collaborators sat facing the camera and Stehli, full frontal, with varying expressions of embarrassment, interest or gleefulness.
Stehli often appropriates iconic imagery from works by artists of previous generations and from existing, often cliched, stylistic genres (fashion photography, S&M imagery). Whilst building on a tradition of female artists appropriating a masculine aesthetic.
In After Helmut Newton’s ‘Here They Come’, 1999, Stehli has recreated Helmut Newton’s iconic image Sie Kommen, with herself as the stiletto-ed, naked Amazon striding towards the camera. Newton’s original is so accurately and minutely reproduced, Stehli’s hair and stance resemble almost exactly that of the original model, that on the surface Stehli is as objectified as Newton’s original.
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