Women and girls have been the subject of my work for a number of years - I strive always to create meaningful portraits that represent them as who they really are. Women have been taught for generations from a very young age that their essential duty in life is to be beautiful; that if you don’t fit into conventional standards of beauty you have no value, or at least a much lower value.

I try to give voice to women from different ethnic, socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, each doing their best to not only accept themselves as who they are, but also to be proud of this. I see my job as a photographer to make women’s stories more visible and therefore, more valuable.

This project delves into issues of self-perception and identity, investigating what it is that we really value about ourselves. It also contains self-portraits, reflecting universal ideas of vulnerability, the need for protection, but also self-confidence, liberation and equality.  These portraits also seek to establish what the essence of true beauty is – the light from within, an individual’s courage and resilience, their uniqueness, elements that cannot be defined simply by appearance.  

Please watch my BTS video below to see how I played with a reflective surface of a holographic card to create uneven shiny bits of light on my face.

This was created out of several images, as I had to hold the main pose in the full body shot, and then take several additional shots where I was shooting red ink into the water to get nice splashes. This was later composited into one image in Photoshop.

I really like using soft painterly light, so projecting light through a large diffuser gives a very beautiful soft result.