Women With Trees

WOMEN WITH TREES is a work in progress

Ultimately, I see the project becoming a movement which will be a vessel for women to come back into their bodies with love and as an opportunity to see their bodies through a new lens. I have spent the last three years traveling and photographing 50 women all across the country. My vision is to publish a book with 50 chapters, one chapter for every woman and each will have an opportunity to share their stories, in their own words. These images need to be seen and these women need to be heard. As of summer 2019, I am entering the post production phase and am currently working getting published.

Mission statement

As trees sprout from seeds and grow into magnificent beings, they take on a vast diversity of wondrous forms uninhibited by societal pressures to conform to standards of beauty. Young saplings twist and grow without criticism, without shame, without judgment, into majestic and beloved bodies of towering grace and elegance.

And from an early age, young girls who are raised in the Western World are denied that same privilege of growing into their mature bodies without regulation and evaluation of their very form.

By juxtaposing the heavily policed bodies of women with the uninhibited beauty of the natural world, Women with Trees showcases the inherent beauty of all women, with the sole aim of setting us free.  Freedom from shame, freedom from patriarchy, freedom from that collective internalized wound that inhibits us from blossoming into the beautiful creatures we are, and are meant to be. 

The freedom of which I speak is not just about weight. The freedom is from shame, and that is a very different and much trickier beast. The shame is not simply about our weight or the size of our body; it is an internalized wound that exists somewhere deep within the belly of all women. This shame is at the heart of why women have such a negative relationship with our bodies and why I have yet to find even one woman who hasn’t suffered from a lifetime of struggling with her own body image. In a culture where blood and violence are perfectly acceptable in all forms of media, but the blood of menstruation is considered repulsive and unspeakable, young women take subconscious cues to be internally ashamed of their most simple bodily functions, and therefore themselves. Additionally, the overwhelming number of images featuring thin, white women, with straight hair and a “perfect” smile pervades our everyday existence.

And for women of color, all of this is just the beginning.  The relentless cues to relegate black and brown skin to the realm of the inferior are not even remotely subconscious.  They are blatant, and they produce an intersectional suffering that confounds women of color’s day-to-day experiences with a racialized dimension from which white women are exempt.

In addition to intersectional feminism, Women with Trees takes cues from the body positive movement as it levels its gaze at plus-size women who have been subjected to “fat shaming” and stigmas that couple the size of their bodies with laziness, ugliness, and inferiority. A primary catalyst for the bodily shame experienced by plus-size women, are media representations of women that exalt thinness as the ideal body type.

  "Women with Trees” is a body positive, intersectional feminist, photojournalistic project that aims to celebrate the diversity of the female form. From California to Connecticut to Montana and everywhere in between, I meet and photograph 50 Women of all shapes, colors and ages with Trees. Each woman will have an opportunity to use her own words and tell her story of her relationship to her body and ultimately herself.

For Women, By Women, Of Women, Women With Trees.