It was 2016 when PhotoVogue dedicated its Festival to the female gaze, questioning the hegemony of the male perspective in the arts, investigating through photography the concept theorised by the film critic Laura Mulvey. The female gaze is an act of redefining reality through the way we look at it. It is also an act of resistance, of regaining back the narration of the woman and the female, for too long and too often held in the hands of men.
We created PhotoVogue Female Gaze, a new series focused on female photographers and their works. In a socio-political landscape in which womxn have gained more centrality but, at the same time, see their (freshly achieved) rights continuously threatened, we think that it is pivotal to share the multifaceted talent of the womxn of our PhotoVogue community. Our artists can be inspiring and encouraging figures for all those who dream but can t or do not have the words to describe or the eyes to see their dreams and potential.
Amy Woodward exhibited her work, ‘Eb and Arlo, post double-mastectomy’ in the last edition of the PhotoVogue Festival in Milan. Woodward has an intimate gaze on what she photographs, yet this doesn t make her work less political. Rather, the personal, deep face of the images makes it possible to freely investigate the meanings of motherhood and womanhood, question what we see as fixed, and rebuild it from foundations. ‘Eb and Arlo, post double-mastectomy’ is a story about a woman who decides not to have breast implants after a double mastectomy. Like in all of her pictures, Woodward gently takes our hand and guides us into a new concept of beauty and freedom, and makes us see what we can celebrate and what we can re-imagine of our reality.
So, first of all, I wanted to ask you how you started portraying motherhood and what you were looking for at the beginning.
When I started working with motherhood, it was only through my process of becoming a mother. I was working in portraiture and just photographing what I saw in my own life before children. And then I think as I went through that transition and that process of matrescence, I came out the other side with a real sense that my identity had just been obliterated. I had this real crisis and I asked myself: is this what I m going to keep doing? And what does photography mean to me now? My first child at the time had really bad reflux and food intolerances; he did not sleep, he was up every 20 minutes. It felt like such an intense initiation into motherhood. I remember feeling so exhausted that I was just in this altered state.
A lot of my time was spent walking around super early in the morning in this sleep deprived haze. We were living out on the Mornington Peninsula for a while and the light was always doing interesting things in the early morning, these beams of light breaking into our home and illuminating dirty piles of washing, spills, breast pads and other random baby items. And I remember I was either always holding him or pushing him in the stroller because he couldn’t be soothed, and I just took my camera everywhere with me. It became this way to document the loneliness, the changes, the complete rebirth. It just naturally came out. And then it branched into me photographing other mothers. I started going deep into those spaces of not necessarily just the loneliness, but also the immense beauty and the messiness, the tactile elements and the fragility - all of that was just suddenly so apparent to me.
Your photographs are very delicate and intimate and yet can be disturbing in a way, challenging the part of us that thinks that pregnancy is a fixed state and not an often difficult journey. What do you want to achieve with your photographs?
Well, I think for me it’s this desire to unveil many facets of motherhood because I think it is oversimplified a lot of the time. The expectation often is that you fall pregnant, have a baby and that’s it. There are so many touch points that are either deeply beautiful or deeply painful, or there s difficulties in conceiving, there s miscarriage, there are multiple ways in which a pregnancy can be immensely challenging, through chronic illness, for example.
I feel like there are just so many points where motherhood branches out and becomes so incredibly complex and intense. So while each journey is just wildly different, we can all kind of come back to those shared moments of going through the process of birth, whether it s a normal physiological birth or a C-section or an undisturbed free-birth in nature - there are so many ways that it can unfold. I feel like it s so incredibly important for me to not just seek to reinforce my own experience of motherhood. You know, my understanding of motherhood is through the lens of my neurodivergence. My eldest son is autistic and my youngest son is now having all of these huge sensory experiences. I have my own sort of challenging journey, but every other mother that I encounter has their own huge story. It s messy, it s contradictory, it s amazing. It s all of those things.
I think that this contradiction you talk about, we can see in your photographs, as I said before, they re very multifaceted.
I think that possibly I am hypersensitive to the sensory experience of motherhood and the tension given that the unmasking of my neurodivergence happened in the context of parenting. And so it s certainly not to say that I feel like my experience is wildly different or more difficult than other mothers because I know so many mothers only discover their neurodivergence through parenting. After all, we have such robust kinds of masking and coping mechanisms. And then when you have a screaming baby who will not let you sleep and you can t go and do your normal little rituals to keep you grounded, things start to get away from you. And so I think some of those photographs look at the touched-out kind of feeling: the pinching of flesh and the sweaty kind of skin-to-skin, the vomit, all of those things connect very strongly to the sensory experience that I have. So whether that s through self-portraiture or other mothers, it all comes into it for sure.
I m entering this phase of life where some of my friends are getting pregnant and reshaping their lives. So, I started asking myself: do I want to be a mother? I realised that I didn t know anything about it. So, what were the things you didn t know when you got pregnant and that, with time, you understood were fundamental to have for a serene (or more serene) pregnancy?
A really big thing that I didn t realise at first is how strongly I would have to advocate for myself to have the birth that I felt I personally wanted. There s so much discussion around the idea that you can t control your birth and all that matters is a healthy mom and a healthy baby. I always felt like that was the absolute bare minimum and that we deserve a whole lot better than that. As mothers, we should be asking for so much more, or even better, receiving so much more without having to ask or fight at every turn to have our wishes and bodies respected.
We should be receiving so much more support, so much more accessible education, and so much more honouring of our desires in pregnancy and birth and early postpartum - there are lot of people who will say really condescending things about a mother who has a plan and a strong desire for how they want their unique birth and motherhood journey to play out.
There s so much to catch up on in such little time. I think that s a result of how disconnected we are from one another and how we don t mother in communities that allow us to see birth, breastfeeding and a slow, gentle postpartum unfold. It s often so separated and hidden. I think we really lose from that because we re so confronted then; we should be learning these things along the way in our communities and we should be so much more supported in that.
So often when we see photographs about motherhood, we see the children as protagonists - which is lovely, don t get me wrong - but the mother looks like a creature in beatitude, in the background. Your photographs have the relation between mothers and their children, and mothers’ bodies, as protagonists. How did you begin subverting this canonical iconography, and why?
Yeah, that s a really interesting question. Once again, I think it probably was quite an internal process. I had a complicated relationship with my body to the point where I didn t even think I was going to be able to conceive, I didn t have a period for many, many years. I thought that I would have a lot of trouble conceiving and watching my body change, and then coming out the other side to postpartum. And I think because that was at the forefront of my mind, I had this healing experience. I think it s just so important to me to show that in my work based on my own experience.
I see in so many ways how the mother has to be a martyr and has to just continuously pour herself out empty and put herself so far into the background for the needs of others. I think I also watched my mother do that for us. I never wanted to see myself shrink so far into the background. And so I feel like it s so important to hold onto some form of my own identity and have that exist alongside my motherhood journey, to honour myself as a whole person too, even while feeling so fused to this new being. Mothers and caregivers deserve to be spotlighted.
What are the rules that you apply to make people you portray comfortable in front of the camera, also because pregnancy is such a delicate and complex, as you said, state?
I think it s such a collaboration and it s such a living relationship that needs to be nurtured. So the aim for me is not to gain trust in order to take a particular photograph. It s to go in there and understand that we re telling a story together and that I want them to have control over the message that they wish to send about their journey.
They know that they can show up in whatever way they want. So I try to give as much control as I can. So a really big, important one is to ensure that the relationship kind of creates a space where that mother can just feel like she s truly being seen and doesn’t have to perform for anyone.
It s funny. I go so blank when I shoot and that sounds ridiculous probably, but I go into an altered state where maybe it just becomes like a physiological process in birth where you just go into a different dimension because you have to surrender to something.
I try not to have any preconceived ideas. I think the less I plan, the more comfortable I feel.I want to protect the space and lean into the spontaneity and chaos of working with mothers and children.
So I think it s also important for the readers to know how you have found the balance between work and personal life and if there were times that you felt that being a woman, a mother, and following your passion was extremely tiring. What did it give you the strength to go on?
There really isn’t any point where I feel I have reached a balance. I make it work somehow because I have no choice and can’t help myself. I just have to pick myself up and then drag myself through it some days. And that may not be the answer that you get from everyone, because I do sometimes wonder if everybody finds it quite as difficult as me or if I just have a particularly hard time managing my energy and expectations. And then when I talk to other mothers, I understand it varies so much.
There s so much to be said for this. The messy inner workings and the behind-the-scenes of what it means to be just an imperfect human and artist as well as being a mother. There are just so many complex ideas there to explore,even for my kids to see that I’m very flawed, that I’m having my own emotional process and struggles. One thing I can say is that the joy of getting to connect so deeply with other mothers while making this work is one huge element that helps me to keep going. I get to have such magical, intense and deeply transformative interactions through this work, and have made wonderful friends and close bonds. And the hope that this work might be contributing in some small way to changing the ideas we have around motherhood is really motivating, too.
I want to talk a little bit about the project you presented at the festival last year. It was about a woman who chose not to have breast implants after the double mastectomy and I think it s interesting, the relationship we have with breasts as a society: they are often sexualized and yet somehow glorified as something necessary for women to use when they have a child. Yet it s often still not safe to breastfeed in public. What did you learn from your encounter with Eb, about bodies, women s bodies, breasts, and how all these complex things are perceived in society?
Eb is just incredible, and it is so wonderful to see her so rightfully comfortable in her body after what she s been through. Some people have such damaging opinions, like the surgeon who spoke about the choice to undergo a flat closure or reconstruction not really being hers but rather being her partner’s choice to make. And I think that shocked me. It shouldn t have shocked me, of course, because we see women s bodies constantly controlled and monitored and censored and objectified every second of every day.
But I m just in awe of Eb. I think that it s so important for her to be witnessed in this way, in her full power. And her pregnancy was a total surprise. She was told she d have to go through IVF after her cancer treatments. I think we have such a distorted understanding of fertility. So particularly when it comes to age: there are always jokes about women and their biological clock ticking, and this whole conversation about how flawed women s bodies are and how fragile and incapable we are. There s language within medical settings around geriatric pregnancy, incompetent cervix or failure to progress in labour, so on and so forth. And I think we are so deficit-focused, deficit-driven when it comes to talking about women s bodies. It s terrible and it really has to change.
There s a photo that I particularly like, and there s a woman with the breastfeeding nipple suction cups. Is it? Are they called that?
Yeah. Expressing milk using a breast pump.
They seem like an extension of the body. And the body looks like a machine, you know? I was very intrigued. So could you please tell me more about this pic?
That was a self-portrait. I did not have an easy breastfeeding journey with my second child. My firstborn and I went on to have a pretty easy breastfeeding relationship, outside of his reflux and his insistence on basically staying latched to my body all the time. But with my second, we didn t do the tongue and lip tie revision quite as early because I remember it being traumatic with my first, and I didn t want to do that so early again. His latch was quite weak due to his hypermobility and tongue restriction, and I think this is a really big one to discuss, because I think we have so many ideas about breastfeeding, that it should be so natural and easy and you just latch the baby on and off as you go. But it s incredibly difficult a lot of the time for many mothers. I dealt with a lot of pain and while I had a really good supply with my first, with my second not so much. I think that portrait, a moment of, um. Yeah, feeling pretty defeated, um, and wanting to be seen in that struggle and for it to be known how hard I was working to produce milk.
Have women ever told you that your photographs helped them? Because I think that all these things are visible in your photographs. They re complex pictures, and I think you communicate all these things. I wonder if you have ever been approached by other women and people experiencing pregnancy.
Yeah, I m often really blown away by how strong of a reaction I get from some of the work that I do, I think because I m so deeply in it myself. I think I m very hard on myself, but I do frequently get to have some really beautiful conversations with mothers who feel represented and feel like there are parts of their journey that they get to see in a different light or something that they felt like maybe they were struggling with.
Mothers feel seen in some of these challenging, tender, hugely transformative moments. Um. It s just a privilege that I don t at all take lightly. And I think that comes from the fact that I m making this work from this vulnerable, honest place. And then I think maybe that brings out a vulnerability in others, and we get to have these really big conversations about things that matter so much to so many of us.
Motherhood, I think, demonstrates that separating personal and professional life is impossible. And it s also a very masculine, if not chauvinist, conception of life that you must be able to separate the personal and professional aspects of your life. Your work demonstrates that mothers remain mothers even at work. And this doesn t make them less professional or less women. So, what are your tips for photographers who just become mothers?
I have definitely chosen to really intertwine my mothering with my work, even though I often crave having some personal space - contradictory as always. I don’t know if I have any particular advice to give as I feel like I approach it clumsily myself, my work and mothering feed off each other in a strange way sometimes. My energy is always split and I really want to live in a world where people understand this natural flux - kids get sick and require everything else to be dropped sometimes, and other times it feels less strained, but at the end of the day I wish that the demands on everyone, parent or not, were less pressing. I wish we all just got to be a little more human on the daily.
I also think society just doesn t see children and mothers as whole people much of the time. There s often this talk from people who maybe have the opinion that they don t like children. And I think that s such a problematic stance to have because it is just really sad for someone to say they don t like children: children are whole people. They are whole people also having an experience in the world, they re not just adults in training. They’re worthy of full respect and protection from discrimination just like any other group and it always feels so twisted to me how acceptable it is to joke about hating kids.
And I think the way parts of society undervalue mothers and children is just a reflection of where we re at as a whole and how we devalue the things that are not contributing to the capitalist machine. But mothers and caretakers are largely doing these hidden roles that are seen as not contributing whereas they are in fact contributing so massively in so many critical ways. The world would collapse if all caregivers just threw their hands up and said, I m not doing this free labour anymore.
The other day I was at the beach with the kids, and this guy was lying down on the sand with his partner. We were there to play in the rock pools - the local kids always play in these beautiful rock pools. This man gets up from where he s lying, and he walks up to me, and says how dare you let your children be so loud while I m trying to meditate? And I just saw red. I probably wasn t an angry person until I became a mother. And this is a whole other conversation that needs to happen, around anger in motherhood, and how taboo it is. I was just so furious. This moment lit a real fire in me and I made a bit of a scene; it possibly stems a lot from my childhood and how I was raised to be compliant and quiet, like most of us were. And now I m just like: I ve got kids, and they re loud and my breasts leak and I m a mess, and you can’t say a word about that.
Be loud, and be seen and heard. Thank you, Amy.
Thank you. I love this segment about the female gaze that includes mothers and includes so many more facets of caregiving. I think motherhood is sort of one of those things that can fall through the cracks within the dominant discussion in feminism because there s still that underlying sort of patriarchal push and so much shame. But you know, we re here.
