Drawing critical attention to straight photographs that showcase Hannah Höch (1889-1978) together with her iconic Puppen (1916/1918), this dissertation examines the intersections between straight photography, portraiture, and puppetry in Höch’s early oeuvre. While in existing scholarship, the straight photographs have predominantly been treated only as visual illustrations or supplemental material, which is at least in part because of their perceived conventionality, this dissertation argues that they are much more complex and innovative than previously assumed. Instead of seeing them as mere illustrations, it reads the photographs as deliberate visual self-stagings whose visual construction merits closer attention as integral part of Höch’s creative output. In three contextualized close readings of three main straight photographs of Höch and her puppets, taken between 1919 and 1925, this dissertation illustrates how Höch’s photographic self-stagings critically engage with conventional forms of representation in ways that challenge inherited meanings. Drawing on Mieke Bal’s concept of visual quotation, I showcase that each of the images evokes social, visual, and artistic conventions by quoting pre-existing imagery, in particular visual representations of women. Specifically, I argue that Höch’s self-stagings evoke familiar images of women as mothers (Chapter One), as puppets and performers (Chapter Two), and as caretakers and homemakers (Chapter Three), which Höch adapts in ways that make visible and challenge prevailing understandings of gender, gender roles, and art. Furthermore, by drawing attention to what Bal refers to as “irregularities” within the images, I argue that the stagings’ use of visual quotation engages the viewer in a form of active seeing that calls into question established modes of vision and perception. Thus, this dissertation proposes a reading of Höch’s self-stagings that not only situates them within contemporary discourses at the intersection of gender and creativity but also reads them in relation to contemporary artistic explorations of the medium of photography to critically and creatively examine established conventions of representation and vision in the late 1910s and early 1920s. This dissertation contributes to scholarship not only on Hannah Höch but also on Berlin Dada and the historical avant-garde with a new approach to the analysis of works long marginalized or disregarded in dominant art-historical narratives. By focusing on Höch’s photographic self-stagings with her puppets, and by situating them at the center of artistic discourses of the late 1910s and early 1920s in Weimar Germany, my dissertation reframes Höch’s relationship to Berlin Dada and the historical avant-garde, and, in doing so, calls into question established accounts of who and what has been seen as significant for the avant-garde.