I photographed more than 80 women over the course of one year in the movie theaters in Vienna. The inspiration originally emerged from Hollywood’s silent film era, which had a lot of female directors, screenwriters and producers at the start, in a medium traditionally dominated by men. Both photography and silent film highlights the idea that gesture, body language and face expression can tell a story without a dialogue. The story in these photographs shows a certain freedom of expressing a strong and vulnerable female self. Women come in and out of the light, they embrace one another; a unique experience at the crossroads of art and performance. They are portrayed intimately and delicately; with nudity as a symbol to signify primal emotion and reveal the vulnerable in the human. To bare oneself completely in front of another; to be naked is to be without disguise. This is a pursuit to visualize the female body free of stigma and taboo; to reclaim, and the audience to gaze with identification rather than possession, in the darkness of the cinema.
