Born at Pukekohe near Auckland, New Zealand in 1958, the photographer Christine Webster is based in the United Kingdom. Introducing her work in New Zealand during the early 1980s, Webster ignored the prevailing documentary genre with her highly orchestrated tableaux. Models in her large cibachromes intentionally avoided any clear gender identification: mass media already provides ample evidence of the controlling of feminine sexuality and its representation. In questioning this process, Webster produces comparable spectacles, skilfully borrowing tricks from 'ad men' and fashion photographers. Her figures (close to human scale or larger) are multi-referenced symbols dramatically lit against impenetrable shadow.

With the 'Can Can' series, Webster has chosen sections of the body (female and male) and adorned them with masks and other trappings of the masquerade. These are presented as a means of teasing the spectator into questioning gender. Transvestism, she suggests, is a game of gender confusion and erotic desire, a suspended intransigence. The loss of the whole body as a point of sexual reference in the 'Can Can' photographs, and the innuendoes produced by the carnivalesque accoutrements, is a powerful strategy to make us re-think questions of male/female identity and of transgressive desires.