Self-Portraits with Men (Czech: Autoportréty s muži), created by Czech photographer Dita Pepe, emerged from her staged self-portrait practice begun in 1999 and developed into a distinct cycle in 2003, picturing the artist with male partners. Pepe turns a private question—"what if my life had taken a different path?"—into a social probe by inserting herself into the lives of men from markedly different milieus, from marginal living conditions to affluent domesticity. The work also draws on the idea of "liquid" modernity associated with sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, treating identity as contingent on relationships, status markers, and shifting expectations. Seen this way, the series isn’t just about changing faces—it asks how identity holds up inside families, under gendered divisions of labor, and amid the need to belong.
Visually, the photographs read as staged family portraits that borrow the stillness of album pictures while remaining rooted in specific, lived settings. Pepe appears as a partner—and at times as a mother alongside children—posed in apartments, workplaces, camps, or leisure spaces that carry the textures of everyday life. Color is central, and the mood shifts from matter-of-fact to quietly unsettling as her transformations make her hard to recognize. Costumes, makeup, and wigs are part of the narrative, yet the overall effect often maintains a "snapshot" register: direct gazes, front-facing arrangements, and environments that refuse to become neutral backdrops.
That apparent casualness is underwritten by a more deliberate technical method. Compared with her earlier, natural-light work, Self-Portraits with Men relies on more complex lighting setups—flashes, portable power packs, and colored backlights—that help maintain a straightforward, everyday surface even in carefully staged situations. The square format reinforces the sense of constructed tableaux, while site-specific staging keeps each scene tethered to the partner’s social world. Pepe’s process—entering a household, adopting clothing and routines, directing bodies into place—functions as an auto-ethnographic experiment in which performance becomes a tool for perception.
Reception has positioned the project within international conversations about staged photography and self-portraiture. Critics frequently compare Pepe to Cindy Sherman, while distinguishing Pepe’s focus on real relationships and her deliberately "unpolished" vernacular. The cycle has been exhibited widely and contributed to milestones such as Pepe’s 2012 award as Personality of Czech Photography for this body of work; it has also circulated through publication, with her monograph later recognized among Kaleid Editions London’s selections of notable photobooks in 2014. Its institutional afterlife includes placements in major collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
