Five female photographers you should know
To celebrate Women’s History Month and on the heels of International Women’s Day, we take a look at the most subversive, fun and intrinsically most beautiful takes offered on the female gaze by five photographers you ought to know.
Text by Sufi Juno Calypso
Juno Calypso is a British artist working with photography, film and installation. While studying photography at the London College of Communication, Juno began taking self-portraits disguised as a hyper-femme alter-ego named Joyce. In 2015 Juno posed as a travel writer and took Joyce to a romantic themed hotel in the US, gaining access to multiple bedrooms which she used as a backdrop to stage her series of solitary imagery titled ‘The Honeymoon’. Her self portraits consist of personal inner workings with feminist undertones of isolation, loneliness and being self-sufficient. The Honeymoon series was awarded an international prize by The British Journal of Photography. For her latest project, ‘What to do With A Million Years’, Juno staged photographs in a mansion built underneath Las Vegas in the 70s as a shelter from nuclear terror, and currently owned by a mystery group attempting to achieve immortality.
Visit Juno’s website or follow her on Instagram to see more of her work.
© Juno Calypso, The Honeymoon Suite
Nakeya Brown
Nakeya Brown is an African American conceptual photographer born in Santa Maria, California. Her works explore black womanhood through the politics of black hair and beauty, examining how it relates to culture and identity. By using photography to extract and redefine symbols of femininity, Nakeya’s practice centers around black female subjectivity and often uses hair as an apparatus to identity facets of womanhood.
Visit Nakeya’s website or follow her on Instagram to see more of her work.
© Nakeya Brown, The Refutation of Good Hair
Camila Falquez
Camila Falquez is a New-York based photographer. As a Columbian immigrant who grew up in Mexico City and Spain, Falquez has developed her own visual and photographic language, channeling the feelings of longing in traditional fashion imagery into more inclusive pictures that speak to representation and social consciousness. Her work merges a personal form of surrealism with a distinctive color palette and empowering gaze. Inspired solely by humans, Camila’s latest project confronts social narratives and subverting stereotypes around gender, her current print sale is raising funds to protest the lives of trans women of colour.
Visit Camila’s website or follow her on Instagram to see more of her work.
© Camilla Falquez
Amanda Rowan
Amanda Rowan is an LA based contemporary photographer. Her creative practice investigates ideas of the female body in the media and its intersection with contemporary visual content creation. Her provocative still life and self-portrait images depict playful and sensual moments, eliciting humour through an exploration of the power and vulnerability of sexuality. Rowan is both curator and subject in each richly styled vignette depicting moments of mysticism and seduction. Her work explores domestic labor and gender using a mix of visual iconography, including food advertising, vintage pinup, and religious deities.
Visit Amanda’s website or follow her on Instagram to see more of her work.
© Amanda Rowan
Jasmine De Silva
Jasmine De Silva is a London based Photographer and Director. Her short films and image making expresses the human obsession and desire to attain perfection through a limitless cycle of physical reconstructions of the self. Her images combining retro-futurism, hyperreal aesthetics, pop-art style colours and diamond studded female bodies, diving into the absurdity of unrealistic beauty ideals. Jasmine’s practise is centered on ‘opulence meeting the mundane’; a dichotomy of existence acting as metaphor for the feminine experience itself.
Visit Jasmine’s website or follow her on Instagram to see more of her work.
© Jasmine De Silva
READ NEXT
