In this essay I will focus on the works of Francesca Woodman and Keith Arnatt, exploring the act of posing in self-portraiture as an effect performance. Despite one of the first staged and posed photographs to be produced undertaking conceptual and artistic innovation ("Self-portrait en noyé" by Hippolyte Bayard, 1840 - a photograph in which the artists create a scene to enact one's own death ), the proposition of the posed image is more commonly associated within the fashion and advertising editorial industry; thereby imposing on us certain connotations and expectations of fantasy within the photograph, essentially agreeing that we understand that what we are looking at has in fact been set up. Furthermore, the workshop, we recognize, is a place where construction and manipulation of the environment take place. Using the idea of ​​our common associations to their advantage, some artists evoke an illusion of complexity by providing realistic elements of perception in a space that, traditionally, is recognized as fiction "the studio", or on the contrary, by introducing elements of fiction in a space recognized as everyday and habitual. These are two themes suggested by Francesca Woodman's “Providence, Rhode Island” (1976) and Keith Arnatt's “Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self” (1969-72). Therefore, I argue that these works exist in fictional dialogue and can be understood in the context of surrealist theory. David Bate discusses this concept of contrasting conventions, while examining what constitutes a surrealist photograph, and acknowledges the undertakings of the surrealist movement. "Surrealism presents itself as an interruption in 'rational' discourse...... middle of paper ...... company explains how the use of traces in photography can escape the recording of time and reality, a predominant characteristic. in the work of both artists. “A photograph is an image that bears the mark of reality. The light that illuminates the world is the light that records its image. In this sense, all photographs are traces. Yet the world itself contains traces or marks…. The photograph of a trace is perhaps the opposite of the “decisive moment”. It's the next moment. It records the marks left by the world on the body and the body on the world. Performance and conceptual art have used photography as a means of recording traces. (2003: 88). The consideration suggested by Campany, according to which the trace is "the opposite of the 'decisive moment'" once again indicates the idea of ​​the staged image. In this particular image, that's exactly what Arnatt appears to be