![]() She studied at Middlesex University and London College of Fashion and frequently shoots editorials alongside her personal projects about queer young people and their identity. CHERRY AUHONIĬherry Auhoni studied footwear design before pursuing her calling of becoming a fashion photographer. “Photographers can’t disconnect their own gaze and voyeurism within their work, and my queer gaze towards my subjects comes through in the way I frame and position the body”. I love to capture dominant personalities in my photography because of my attraction to those types of power dynamics in my personal life,” she adds. “Many of my compositions are created through the lens of my own submissive desires. ![]() She also curates Dressed For Pleasure, “an archive at the intersections of fetishism, fine art and pop culture” and collects vintage fetish magazines and books which often serve as a source of inspiration. After moving to New York five years age, she began exploring kink in her personal life and creativity – and now she is one of the most prolific photographers working with fetish (latex, leather, you name it) and NYC’s kink community. “My queerness is intrinsically linked to my kink identity, and both absolutely inform the way I create work,” explains NYC-based photographer Lanee Bird. ![]() New times need new images – here are seven female queer photographers to hit follow on. But the rise of the female queer gaze is not just about lesbian culture or the fashion industry – it’s about ambiguity and fluidity when it comes to gender expression, and the representation of desire and love which have been culturally supressed for centuries. Though lesbian culture is still far from being fully present in the mainstream, there are many more authentic voices rising up and pushing it to the forefront: from meme-makers and online curators to fashion designers like recent CSM graduate Ella Boucht, whose final collection explored lesbian dresscodes and queer gender presentation. Reminiscing on her earlier practice, she added: “I wanted to essentially make a billboard in a gallery that talked about visibility and representation at a time when there was no real lesbian representation in the art world”. In an interview with Aperture, Schorr once recalled a shoot for Saint Laurent where “the models were styled and encouraged to perform and play outside of what is traditionally seen: heteronormal women”. ![]() Starting out in the late 1980s and gradually transitioning from the art world into fashion, Schorr’s work unpacks the subjective natures of objectification and representation – be it regarding men through an erotic gaze or offering female models an incredibly powerful presence in front of the lens. Collier Schorr has been a crucial and pioneering figure when it comes to portraying queer desire and gender ambiguity in fashion. Looking back across the last couple of decades, one name immediately springs to mind. That’s why there’s a huge deal of power that comes with being a woman working in the realm of fashion photography – and, even more so, being a queer woman working in the field. ![]() Of course, it can be damaging too, reflecting the uneven hierarchy of our society. It goes without saying, then, that fashion imagery is crucial for representation, shaping ideas of beauty, and what kinds of people fit within those boundaries. Though fashion is often dismissed as frivolous, the opposite, in fact, is true – and fashion imagery is particularly powerful: Offering not only a world in which to dream, it also gives us a glimpse of the people we would like to meet or even be someday. In the likely scenario that you've ever picked up a fashion magazine, at some point you’ll have probably experienced an urge to tear out a page from an editorial and stick it to your wall because it touched something within you. ![]()
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