the story behind ‘empty woman’
A few days ago I almost halved my portfolio, overwhelmed with this feeling that none of it was good enough. And I realised that this feeling of “not being good enough” had nothing to do with the images themselves. It was related to how well I had achieve the desired result.
Using this same consideration, it’s easy for me to choose an image I am most proud of – Empty woman.
Before making this image, I was angry with women. At how we treat our bodies, and have lost touch with the health impact of our actions. We let ourselves become ridiculously overweight, we starve ourselves or cut out important nutrients, we binge drink, we pump our lungs and blood full of drugs. And why? To feel comforted, or beautiful, or sexy, or sociable, or liked. And this made me so angry. I wanted to show people how fucked up it is.
For Empty Woman, I wanted to focus on one example of this: that being malnourished or extremely underweight affects your fertility. We all sit in health class and hear stories about anorexic ballerinas who stop having their periods, and it feels so distant. Or we scrutinize celebrities as they yo yo between eating disorders. It’s rare that we actually meet someone who can admit they have faced these challenges.
Casting a model for this image was difficult. I wanted to use someone who was healthy in reality, yet extremely thin for the sake of impact. And I didn’t want her to look anything like a ballerina, or a celebrity. Just like a normal person. Earlier incarnations of this shot had the model holding an ultra sound (with child) in front of her pelvis and when finding an empty pool started looking very difficult, I considered shooting in an abandoned warehouse.
Eventually there was an opportunity to shoot at Aradale Asylum and I knew I’d seen pictures of an empty pool there from other photographers’ work. Completing this image was the main reason for going. And I was eternally thankful to my model who not only drove the 3 hours out of Melbourne to be there, but stood in a cold sludgy pool in freezing cold weather.
Looking at the final image, and more importantly, the comments people have left on it makes me feel really proud. It’s rare that other people see my work the way I had hoped or intended, but in this case, other people felt a bit of what I was feeling. And that means the world to me.
