Kella! - Hasadri Freeman
One of the largest foci I’ve developed over my time at LM as a student artist has been the study of girlhood and femininity. So many feminist politics portray equality as a female hardness in a perceived equality to masculinity. While beneficial for second-wave feminists entering the job force, where masculinity was a ticket to job access, it has become detrimental as it continues to pervade cultural perception: femininity in all its forms--dresses, sweat, introspection--has become seen as lesser when inhabiting female bodies.
With these photos, I wanted to study and celebrate traditional femininity. The communal joy, soft lines and colours, and gentle depiction of introspection are things I see in my own femininity and that of the friends I photographed, and thus are things I tried to incorporate into every image. I also wanted to add what I felt were the ignored commonalities of the feminine experience, things like perspiration, the sensuality of sleep, and the experience of looking at oneself in the mirror.
My inspirations have been Ashley Armitage, a young fine art and commercial photographer whose feminist politics and, indeed, her femininity and that of her subjects, are inherent to her work’s success. Of late, I’ve also been inspired by the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad, an Iranian poet whose poetry reshaped ideas of what is traditional about and inherent to femininity in twentieth century Iran.
Photography by Hasadri Freeman ‘19
Models: Juliet Bogan, Sabrina Boczko, Zora Gamberg, Erieon Dominick, and Madeleine Shalaby
Check out more of Hasadri’s photography:
Instagram: @freesadj
VSCO: @hasadrikf