The female gaze is a concept that has always inspired me within my work and I love the idea of being able to empower and uplift women through my art. For this photoshoot i had planned i was mainly inspired by Ashley Armitage’s shoot for the Razor companies campaign, Billie. This idea of this shoot was to show models with underarm hair as well as pubic hair in a bid to help make women’s body hair less of a controversial topic. Billie became the first women’s razor brand to show body hair in their campaigns and this was a big step for women and how they’re portrayed within the media. For my shoot i wanted to recreate this angelic, feminine style of photography whilst focusing on the body hair and body positivity movement.

The Set Up

This was the set up for the shoot. I set this up in my bedroom using a silk fabric as the backdrop and then my bed with different pink materials so there was a mix of textures. to create the warm glow lighting in the backdrop i used two lamps and put them behind the pink silk backdrop. To create front lighting i used a spotlight lamp as well as a pink neon sign in some photographs. The reason i chose to do this shoot in my bedroom was because i wanted to create a certain aesthetic and narrative. I wanted to create a dreamy atmosphere that was warm and relaxed so that the final photos would look more like girls just hanging out rather than being a brightly lit and staged studio shoot.

 

The Photographs

These are all of my favourite photos from the shoot. I feel that this shoot is exactly what i set out to do and you can see the models in the photoshoot are portrayed as strong and powerful women. I do think that even though they are in their underwear they are still not shown as sexualised but instead empowering and that’s exactly what i wanted for the shoot. The body hair movement is a previously taboo subject and women in the media are normally portrayed as glossy showing no hair and i love that with this shoot it is trying to end the stigma behind women and body hair, trying to prove a point that body hair is natural.