Your images are very powerful and you can see, like we said, all the pain, all the effort. But at the same time, they avoid the male gaze. So, how did you find your own way, your personal female way to portray these women? I think it’s important to underline that not because you’re a woman you can’t have a male gaze, right?
Of course, exactly. When I first started as a photographer, I feel like I photographed women with a male gaze, if that makes sense. I just didn’t love how I was photographing women, if I’m gonna be entirely honest, because I grown up really loving a lot of male photographers, which is fine. But I think it informed me early on how to take photos, and I had this big reckoning that this didn’t feel that I was empowering women. And so, yes, women can have a male gaze, and men can have a feminine gaze. And regardless, I wanted to have a more female gaze. I think that it was about finding women that were strong, that weren’t being celebrated by the mainstream male media.
I also wanted to approach them differently: I would start the shoot like an interview getting to know them, their comforts and their discomforts, what makes them spark and what makes them feel bored. And I didn’t want anything to feel exploited. That was a big part of how I felt as a photographer: it’s so common that people find subcultures and they exploit them and point fun at them, and that was the last thing I wanted to do. This had to be about honouring these people and shedding light on them. Some people will always think that they’re weird-looking, but I’m normalising it, and that’s the first step.
