Christine Webster is one of New Zealand’s most innovative artist photographers working with a traditional image – the male nude. This work is from her series, ‘Possession and Mirth’ (1992) in which she explored gender, identification and appropriation through myth and symbol. Blood, with its doubled image of a male figure enveloped in what appears to be a mantle of blood, has a sexual and erotic intent. Webster’s deconstruction of the photographic subject is a post-modern technique that aims to highlight notions of the gaze, objectification and shifting perspectives of identity. Webster studied at Massey University and Victoria University between 1976 and 1978 and in 1979 she received a Diploma in Photography from Wellington Polytechnic. In 1990 she was awarded the Polaroid Small Projects Grant, Offenbach am Main, Germany. Webster was the Frances Hodgkins Fellow in 1991, and undertook a Goethe-Institut Cultural Scholarship to Berlin in 1994. She has exhibited widely in New Zealand as well as in Australia, the Netherlands, Hong Kong and Germany.