Over the course of a year, I photographed more than one hundred women inside movie theaters across Vienna. Drawing inspiration from the silent era of Hollywood cinema, I became fascinated with the moving image stripped of sound—where expression, gesture, and gaze become the sole conveyors of emotion and narrative. Like early cinema, photography too is a medium where silence speaks volumes; both rely on the body as a vehicle of meaning, emphasizing that storytelling can unfold without words.
This project explores the silent, intimate choreography between women—how they move in and out of the light, how they observe and are observed, how they touch, hold, and perform presence. Set within the charged atmosphere of the cinema, these images stage a kind of quiet performance at the intersection of still image and moving image, of reality and representation.
The women are depicted delicately, often nude—not as objects, but as subjects reclaiming the image of the female body from the dominant, objectifying gaze that has historically defined women in film. Here, nudity becomes a symbol not of erotic display, but of vulnerability, honesty, and primal emotional states. To be naked is not to perform for another, but to exist without artifice. It is a gesture of trust and unmasking.
This work questions how we look at women—and how women look at one another—when freed from narrative constraints and commercial expectations. In the darkness of the cinema, I invite the audience not to consume these bodies but to identify with them, to witness rather than possess. The project becomes a quiet resistance: a visual language of femininity that resists spectacle and instead seeks communion, empathy, and presence.
