The female gaze is an act of redefining reality through the way we look at it.
We created PhotoVogue Female Gaze, a new series focused on female photographers and their works.
Woodward has an intimate gaze on what she photographs, yet this doesn’t make her work less political.
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.
I had this real crisis and I asked myself: is this what I’m going to keep doing?
Amy Woodward photographed by Ana Margarita Flores
And what does photography mean to me now?
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.
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.
What do you want to achieve with your photographs?
The expectation often is that you fall pregnant, have a baby and thats it.
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.
It’s messy, it’s contradictory, it’s amazing.
It’s all of those things.
After all, we have such robust kinds of masking and coping mechanisms.
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.
There’s so much to catch up on in such little time.
It’s often so separated and hidden.
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.
And I think because that was at the forefront of my mind, I had this healing experience.
I think I also watched my mother do that for us.
I never wanted to see myself shrink so far into the background.
Mothers and caregivers deserve to be spotlighted.
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 so that take a particular photograph.
They know that they can show up in whatever way they want.
So I have a go at give as much control as I can.
I try not to have any preconceived ideas.
What did it give you the strength to go on?
There really isnt any point where I feel I have reached a balance.
I make it work somehow because I have no choice and cant help myself.
I just have to pick myself up and then drag myself through it some days.
And then when I talk to other mothers, I understand it varies so much.
There’s so much to be said for this.
I want to talk a little bit about the project you presented at the festival last year.
Yet it’s often still not safe to breastfeed in public.
And I think that shocked me.
But I’m just in awe of Eb.
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.
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.
Are they called that?
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 c’mon tell me more about this pic?
That was a self-portrait.
I did not have an easy breastfeeding journey with my second child.
But it’s incredibly difficult a lot of the time for many mothers.
I think that portrait, a moment of, um.
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.
Mothers feel seen in some of these challenging, tender, hugely transformative moments.
It’s just a privilege that I don’t at all take lightly.
Motherhood, I think, demonstrates that separating personal and professional life is impossible.
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 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.
They are whole people also having an experience in the world, they’re not just adults in training.
And I just saw red.
I probably wasn’t an angry person until I became a mother.
I was just so furious.
Be loud, and be seen and heard.
Thank you, Amy.
I love this segment about the female gaze that includes mothers and includes so many more facets of caregiving.
But you know, we’re here.
