​ARTIST’S STATEMENT:

Most women know these microadjustments so well they’ve become automatic: scrunching their bodies against the cold wall of the bus to avoid touching the manspreading passenger. The identifying details given to a friend before going a first date. The phone call dialed while nightwalking. The ever present Text me when you’re home safe message. 

Women have been scrutinized through the lens of male desire and power for centuries, dictating what they wear, what they say and what they don’t, how they say it, and how they move their bodies through space.

Hanna Webster’s debut gallery collection explores how the male gaze impacts the way those impacted by the male gaze engage with their bodies in public and what might change if its burden was lifted. A photographer since the age of seventeen, Webster has spent a decade observing bodies through this lens — their curves, valleys, sharp edges — and even longer perceiving her own body through it.
 
The series, shot on 35mm film on her great grandfather’s Minolta camera, uses mirrors and strategic angling to conjure the feeling of being watched while resisting objectification. Webster obscures her subjects through unfocused lenses and trick mirror angles. She zooms in close to the body, warping space and letting bodies exist in their natural forms without the imposition of sexuality. Signs of sexuality and feminine signals are present — lingerie, lace, fresh flowers — yet their presence is not a dilution of the feminine but instead an enhancement of its inherent power, unshackling the subjects from the pressure to perform under the male gaze. Inspired in part by the German photographer Katja Heinemann, Webster’s collection maintains both softness and force, imbued with voyeurism while also confronting the viewer head on.
 
DON’T LOOK AT ME: Don’t filter me through the lens that colors women’s interactions and stunts them mentally, socially, and financially.
DON’T LOOK AT ME: Watch me regain power by resisting what men define as sexual.  
​DON’T LOOK AT ME: When I’m liberated from this gaze, it’s because I saw my body for the myriad other ways it serves me. It’s because I decided.