To combat their invisibility, I photograph post-menopausal women

July 18, 2021

A few years ago I found myself in a carpool. By chance, I was sitting between a pensioner and a gynecologist, who broached the topic of menopause.

Me, I was a young adult and was just starting to get sickened by the extent of the sexism. I already knew what the mental load was, which was that female bodies never lived up to the standards set on them. But I had never gotten close this question of age in womenand I had heard very little about it.

Are women meant to be afraid of getting old?

In the car, this retired woman cried. He said he felt useless since entering menopause, she was no longer wanted. She had had her breasts redone and the wrinkles pulled out of her to feel a little better physically. Her husband had cheated on her with a younger woman.

When the ride was over and I got out of the car, I cried and thought to myself:

” I don’t want to be a woman. I don’t want to be afraid of getting old, of having to pay attention to the smallest details of my body, which will never be good enough anyway. I don’t want to feel invisible because I’m over 50, while men have the right to age. »

I started studying documentary photography

This event stuck in the back of my mind and I continued on my journey. I started studying psychology, I read Fatal beauty by Mona Chollet and I found it crazy that we didn’t realize all that it shows us sooner.

I ended up abandoning psychotherapy to undertake specialized studies in documentary photography. With my photos I wanted to talk about feminismfemale breasts, sexuality…

And then, I embarked on my first old age project. I wanted to show these aging bodies, to show the ones we never want to look at after menopause.

When I announced this to my teachers, the reactions were quite surprising: they tried to dissuade me. However, I was convinced of the importance of the topic! But I was told You won’t make it. It’s too complicated to show mature and naked women. Either way, they will refuse to strip and pose. »

I started the project Pretty children

I started to realize how much society looked away from old age. I searched for models around me, proposing to neighbors, mothers of friends, acquaintances… and everyone said no. It was at a live modeling workshop that I met the first of the women over 50 who agreed to pose for me. I met some of her friends who agreed to participate in my project.

Then, doing research on Instagram, I also came across silver influencers, models over 60. I contacted them, and that’s how I met the 21 women who built the project Beautiful Moms.

Pretty children, is a series of photographs of women over 50 who have gone through menopause and are naked. Beautiful, because they are, and Children because we called them that one day, and we are all grown-up children.

For each series of portraits, the process was almost the same. I went to these people I didn’t know and who didn’t know me, and before photographing them we talked for a long time.

We talked about their lives, the events that mark women, their relationship with their bodies and with others, their romantic or sexual partners… And then, we talked about taboo subjects in society, which we never hear about. Vaginal dryness, menopause, desire.

Listening to these twenty-one women, I found the same elements in all their speeches. The feeling of having become invisible to the eyes of the world, of no longer existing, of no longer being useful. In the context of work, their emotional life and their sexuality.

For some, not to be seen again is a source of joy: they were finally calm and had peace with their bodies. For others, not being seen was a source of great sadness. Not feeling desirable anymore made them sad.

Most of the time they said they weren’t sexually satisfied.

Testimonials and pictures

I think these conversations have been the most rewarding moments of my life. Being able to interact with his elders like this is overwhelming, and there is great strength in what they have passed on to me: the desire for things to changethat women of my generation may age differently than theirs.

I photographed them with a rolleiflex, a film camera that forces you to lower your head to look into the camera when you take the picture. This allowed for a great modesty, a great feeling of intimacy between me and the models: I never looked directly at them.

Then I would go home and develop the photographs in my darkroom. It was the only time I could look at them and understand the connections between their speeches and their photos. Obviously, I didn’t retouch their bodies, played only on light and contrasts.

“Men have the right to grow old”

In my work as a photographer, I notice every day that men over 50 are rarely retouched, while women of the same age are completely retouched. They’re so smooth you don’t recognize them anymore, as if the message we were trying to convey was that women rot as they get older.

Nobody ever talks about Gérard Depardieu’s wrinkles: men have the right to grow old. When we see them do, no one dwells on the signs of this change. While we constantly hear about Catherine Deneuve’s brands, for example.

We are immersed in an unhealthy race towards youth. Models start at 16 and are already too old for some areas at 30. I want to shout that we live in a sick society, that it’s not normal to think that after a certain age women can no longer be beautiful.

I am 24 years old and feel enormous pressure to stay young. Telling yourself that the passage of time will make me feel invisible, unwanted, is a source of anxiety. Sometimes being a woman sucks to me.

We need to change the way we look at older women

Before discussing my project with the models, I had no idea of ​​these issues, I had never thought about them. Because by dint of never seeing women over 40 in movies, series or performed around you, we forget that old age existsand that will happen to us too.

But after all these discussions, I look at the older women around me much more often. And I find them beautiful. We must learn to take another look at old age, which is nothing but a state of the body, a change of physical state.

This is what I try to do in my work: show these bodies that we never look at with tenderness, and show that they have the same beauty as the others. What can we say to ourselves, looking at them, She is beautiful ” and not ” It must have been beautiful not only in a physical sense, but also as a person.

That’s why I chose photography as an expressive medium, because it’s a good way to open minds without having to go through words. I wish that by seeing these photos, we could ask ourselves questions, and say to ourselves ” Maybe I was wrong and old age is not bad “. There is nothing wrong with old age! What’s bad is setting aside the elderly in our society, saying ” They are finished “.

I hope to be able to exhibit this project in Paris soon, and above all to continue to explore it. In France, the relationship with old age is also cultural, and intrinsically linked to the image of the French woman.

I know that in Germany or Morocco things are very different. I would like to analyze this relationship with the age of women everywhere and show it. i want too advertising lingerie with unretouched bodiesput up posters and reduce, as far as possible, the pressure on women and their bodies.

It’s time to let go and allow ourselves to free ourselves from these anxieties related to our physical appearance.