By Photographer, Emma Maggs.
For almost twenty years, I’ve made a living telling stories.
I’m a producer, director and photographer, and I’ve spent a large part of my career interviewing people, looking for the little moments that reveal something bigger. Somewhere along the way, that curiosity became Wildfemmes, my photographic and storytelling project exploring women, our bodies, our identities and the complicated relationship we have with both.
Wildfemmes began with underwater portraits. Beautiful, unguarded images of women stripped of all the usual noise. No posing, no perfect lighting, no sucking anything in.
But the more women I photographed and spoke to, the more interested I became in everything happening outside the frame.
How do we actually feel about our bodies? And when did we first learn they needed fixing?
How much of the way we see ourselves is genuinely ours, and how much has been handed to us by advertising, magazines, social media, diet culture, beauty standards and decades of being told, very efficiently, that there is always something we could improve?
And, perhaps most importantly: is any of it changing?
So I created The Wildfemmes Census.
It’s a survey asking women across Australia about body image, ageing, confidence, beauty, social media, motherhood, representation and the messages we’ve absorbed about what a woman is supposed to look like.
Not exactly light chat over a French rosé, but here we are.
The early responses have already been fascinating. There are contradictions, generational differences and moments of enormous confidence sitting right alongside old insecurities.
And that’s exactly why I want to keep going.
Because forty women can start a conversation. Four hundred, or four thousand, can start to show us something much bigger.
For the Census to mean anything, I need women from everywhere. Different ages. Different bodies. Different backgrounds, cultures, experiences and stages of life.
Women who love their bodies. Women who don’t. Women who have made peace with ageing and women currently staring into the bathroom mirror wondering when that line appeared.
There are no right answers, and you don’t need to be a “body positive” person to take part. In fact, please don’t wait until you have a beautifully resolved relationship with yourself.
Most of us are still working that one out.
The bigger the response, the more meaningful the picture becomes, and the better chance we have of understanding what women are really thinking and feeling, rather than what we assume they are.
So, if you’re a woman in Australia, I’d love you to add your voice.
The Census is anonymous, it only takes a few minutes, and your answers will become part of the next chapter of Wildfemmes.
Fill out The Wildfemmes Census. Then send it to another woman.
Because if we want to understand whether the story is changing, we first need to hear from the women living it.
