I was recently asked to have my work featured in a gallery on Palm Beach Island, called Haven.
This has been a dream of mine for so long. As someone who went to an art school for college and has been photographing since the age of 16, it felt like such a missing piece to my artistic puzzle.
But, I was also excited for other reasons. I felt like this would give me the platform to show women something different.
For anyone who visits galleries, you know that the photographer usually hires a model or photographs a subject that interests them. I want to stretch that.
I want to bridge the gap between fine art and client work.
I make it a point to talk with the people who enter the gallery space. I let the women know that the women in the photographs were not hired models. They are women who wanted to be photographed beautifully. It’s important to let everyone that sees my work know that they can be the very women they saw growing up. The women in magazines, on TV, in galleries, etc. You know, the ones we all compared ourselves to and based our unrealistic beauty standards off of. Yeah, those women.
We collect art of other women and it’s time to be those women we see and admire.
It’s time we invest in ourselves and value our worth.
I also want to be transparent in the fact that I’m able to photograph women in such a way because these women go through an in-depth process with me. I ask personal questions that require a level of vulnerability that pushes us to get to some real truth. It’s the only way we can break the cycle of self-doubt, comparison, shame, and all of the other lies we’ve been telling ourselves our entire lives.
We can accomplish both, and we will. Women deserve to be the art they’ve admired. Women deserve to redefine what beauty is.
