Claude Cahun employed photography to construct a personal mythology, an imaginary life outside the social confines of the historical world. Born into a prominent Jewish family of writers and publishers, she studied at the Sorbonne and then at Oxford before moving back to Paris with her lover and stepsister Suzanne Malherbe. There they participated in the creative ferment of French intellectual life between the World Wars. Cahun hovered on the margins of the Surrealist group, publishing in their journals and contributing sculpture-objects to their exhibitions but, for the most part, remaining independent of any movement.

In both her writing and her photography, Cahun disrupts restrictive ideas about gender, in particular, social prescriptions about femininity. Her texts were initially published in the newspaper Mercure de France, first in 1914 under the transitional name of Claude Courlis and then in 1917 as Claude Cahun, a family name on her maternal side. As "Claude" is gender-ambiguous in French, her choice of this pseudonym is itself a form of cross-dressing. Beginning in 1912, she initiated a lifelong obsession with self-portraiture, presenting herself alternately as elegant dandy in masculine attire and closely cropped haircut, and demure maiden in tightly-laced dress and fastidious braids. Almost as often, she depicted herself as androgyne, or as a historical or fictional character. Whether Buddha, masked avenger, vampire, rag doll, or her own father, Cahun assumed roles that were denied to her in the social world. Cahun's use of costumes and her assumption of characters reflect her involvement in avant-garde theater. She was active in the Théâtre Esotérique and Le Plateau, two experimental troupes that included Japanese, Indian, and Sufi programs on their rosters. Many of her photographs obscure boundaries between public and private, or between theatrical stills and portrait photography. In several self-portraits she appears in actual theater costumes, posing in one example as Belle from Barbe-Bleu (Bluebeard).

In her costumed self-portraits, Cahun projects both multiple identities and multifaceted selves. Using dynamic compositional strategies, she often literally doubles her image through reflections, photomontages, or composites. Examples of such photographs, in which she manipulated negatives to multiply her image, include some of the self-portraits she made at her home on the Isle of Jersey, where she and Malherbe relocated in 1937. Cahun not only continued to make photographs in her new surroundings, but also began to transfer her strategies of masquerade from artistic production to political activity. With Malherbe as coconspirator, she launched a covert anti-Nazi resistance operation in which both women assumed disguises to undermine the German occupation. Cahun and Malherbe were arrested, tried, and sentenced to death, but ultimately released from prison at the war's end. In the meantime, much of Cahun's work had been confiscated or destroyed by German soldiers. She continued making photographs until her death in 1954.