This Photographer Turns the Feminine Ideal on its Head
TIME: What exhausts you about the “feminine ideal”?
Juno Calypso: What exhausts me is the repetition of it. And the fact that you can’t escape it. But everyone is sort of hypnotized by it and that’s why it’s so exciting. Everybody wants to be a better version of themselves. Before, women were trapped in the kitchen and they could slam the door and run away and leave. But now we’re sort of trapped in our own bodies and there’s no escape from it.
Documenting The Female Gaze
For filmmakers Remy and Kelsey Bennett, a curatorial sister duo from New York, celebrating women’s successes (and struggles) is not a momentary undertaking. In a new documentary series called Under Her Skin, they explore the lives of six women—aged seventeen to seventy-one—through their artistic process. “An artist holds the tools to express themselves from a place that the artist herself cannot even fully explain or sometimes understand,” Kelsey Bennett says.
Photography's Girl Culture Revolution
TIME: How did military service shape your understanding of womanhood?
Mayan Toledano: I had a really hard time being in the military; I mostly remember my frustration from those two years. I felt really trapped; physically in the uniforms and also having this mandatory service when I'm so young and unable to protest it.
Behind the Goddess Myth
To view Erik Madigan Heck’s portrait of motherhood is to drift into a modern fairy tale. His wife as a pre-Raphaelite vision. His child, a cherubic babe with blond curls. They appear to exist on a higher plane of domestic bliss.
Fashion photographer Heck, whose image from his personal work is on this week’s cover, talked about its creation with TIME. “The picture would be different if it was constructed,” he says of the photo of his wife, Brianna Killion, and their son Winston. “But we were just lounging around outside and she was breastfeeding and I think my camera was on the table and I just grabbed it.”
