Over the years, I’ve been photographing women. It’s not something I’ve been doing on purpose. I only noticed it recently: I was going through all the pictures I took in the last decade, and I realized in that moment that most of my photos were of women—friends, acquaintances. 

This made me question: Why did I insistently turn my camera towards women? What distinguished them from any other subject? What made these pictures seem so cohesive and coherent as a group, despite a five-year time span? Was it that I felt a shared sensitivity with women like I never did with men? Was it that I just simply understood them? 

I sought to understand my own photos, reading about the male/female gaze dichotomy and exploring the history of women in photographs. The more I read, the more I understood that what I did was not a study of the female body, nor was it a simplistic exercise of aesthetics. Just as others have seen them for so long, women have seen themselves as mere objects. In my photos, I wanted them to be the subject, to be seen in their true form and shape, as their true selves. I didn’t want them to be solely looked at; I wanted you to see them as I did—to see them through a fellow woman’s eyes.