ESCAPE: A Photographic Exploration of Taking Up Space and How the Urban Landscape Reflects and Resists Women’s Presence

This photographic body of work explores the concept of taking up space through the ways the urban landscape reflects and resists women’s presence. The images focus on the built environment itself; spaces that often feel unwelcoming, surveilled, or off-limits. They interrogate how women are conditioned to navigate public spaces with caution and heightened awareness. Drawing inspiration from work by authors such as Mary Beard and Leslie Kern, the project expands upon Beard’s examination of the history of women being systematically silenced and excluded from public life, alongside Kern’s analysis of how this exclusion occurs in contemporary physical manifestations of these dynamics within cities. Shot on 35mm black and white film, the photographs emphasize starkness and isolation. The images are accompanied by text taken from personal conversations with women to reveal the various dimensions of these encounters with the urban landscape. This project aims to validate an intense experience that is widely normalized among women. It also aims to question not just what is felt, but the systems and patterns in place that make this so common.