I was thinking about Degas' women and how Degas tried to capture the female experience (washing, dancing, working) in a mimicry of voyeurism. He’s looking at these unnamed women without them noticing, or so we are led to believe. They are models. They are aware of him painting them, and they are acting like a woman unwatched. (Are we all?) I find the images themselves so appealing, with their hunched, bathing bodies and their lack of self-consciousness. But I wish these images were women-authored or least authentic.

When I was preparing to have my first daughter, Frankie, I read in a book that women in labor were often first attended to by other women. That is, until it was time for the baby to come out. Then the male doctor would enter. And their bodies would seize up, close up, making birth more difficult. Too aware of their openness.

Women Without Men is a play on Hemingway’s 1927 collection of stories, “Men Without Women.” I wanted these photographs, taken on film on my Pentax P30, to be about life, a version of it I only see in glimpses.

Of course, the female gaze exists too.

I perpetuate it through these images.

The driving question behind this spontaneous project was do women do things differently when there are no men around? What I found was that it depends on the woman. 

But deeper questions came through, crystalline and unanswerable: 

How do we see women? How do we see ourselves? What is seeing, and are we ever seen? 

Photography is one way to see. And I like to think, while looking through the project as it stands, that I saw these women for a moment. 

I was lucky enough to showcase this work at Lily Pad in July 2026 and The Writer’s Block Gallery, along with Kyra Watkin’s paintings of women, in August 2026.