THE SHAPE OF HER

In the remote outback of Australia, I met a group of Aboriginal women who welcomed me into their world with quiet generosity. I was kindly invited to sit with them, to share freshly baked bread, kangaroo tail roasted over the fire, and sweet black tea. Out here, the usual social niceties around food fade into the background—when you dig a hole in the red desert sand, collect dried bushes to keep the fire going, and bake the bread yourself, hospitality is measured in action, not formality.

These women don’t fit the dominant image of what femininity is supposed to look like. They live far from gyms, fashion stores, and wellness culture. Their beauty isn’t polished or filtered—it’s lived, weathered, and deeply rooted in land, community, and stories.

Through these portraits, I want to question the narrow visual language that so often defines what it means to be feminine. Who gets to be seen as ‘woman enough’? Who shaped that image—and who is excluded by it?

The women in The Shape of Her carry a strength that isn’t for show. It’s practical, ancestral, unspoken. Being among them—unfiltered, unapologetic, and unshaped by the gaze of the outside world—felt unexpectedly liberating. Despite the deep injustices and poverty they endure, their presence offered something rarely found in today’s curated culture: a quiet kind of freedom. It’s a reminder that perhaps we have more to learn from them than from the so-called influencers who define our screens.