There is a habit in photography and film theory of treating the camera as masculine. The language itself encourages it. We shoot. We capture. We penetrate a space. We talk about the gaze as if looking is an act of possession, and for a long time the people culturally authorized to do that looking were men.
I understand where that language comes from, but I have never experienced the camera that way. To me, a camera is not a weapon or an extension of a phallus. It is a dark, concave chamber that receives something from the outside world, transforms it, and produces an image. It takes in light. It holds an impression. It creates a new version of what entered it. The more I work, the more the camera feels less phallic than uterine. The camera is a womb.
I do not mean that as an argument that women are naturally more suited to directing or photography, or that creativity belongs to one anatomy. I mean it as a challenge to the metaphors we have inherited. The metaphors matter because they quietly decide who looks like they belong behind the camera. If the camera is imagined as a weapon, conquest starts to feel like authorship. If it is imagined as a vessel, authorship can become something else: reception, transformation, gestation, memory.
I have spent enough time on both sides of the lens to understand how much power sits inside that distinction. I modeled briefly when I was younger. I also worked behind the camera, including assisting Annie Leibovitz and later assisting Kurt Weston, an award-winning legally blind photographer in Orange County. Those experiences did not give me a clean theory about photographers or subjects. They gave me a complicated one. The camera can be a place of incredible intimacy and attention. It can also become a machine for sorting women.
One of the things I noticed early was how often male photographers and directors triangulated women against one another. The hierarchy could change depending on the room. In fashion, I had a photographer tell me I was “actually smart,” unlike the models. The compliment was supposed to elevate me. It only worked by degrading another group of women. In comedy circles, I experienced almost the inverse. Because I dressed up, wore makeup, and presented as feminine, I was frequently sexualized and treated as if I must be less serious or less intelligent than women whose presentation was more casual or androgynous.
Both systems were doing the same thing. A woman could be respected, or she could be desired, but she was not supposed to be both. Respect was rationed. Men could pedestalize one woman in order to justify objectifying another. If the “smart woman” was exempted from sexualization, then the sexualized woman could be treated as unserious. If the “serious woman” rejected femininity, then the feminine woman could be dismissed as shallow. The categories moved, but the mechanism did not.
The virgin-whore dichotomy is often discussed as if it were only about sex. I think it is also a system of triangulation. It asks women to participate in their own sorting. Be the respectable one. Be the exceptional one. Be the woman who is not like those women. Once women are separated into moral or intellectual categories, abuse becomes easier to rationalize. The person doing the sorting can tell himself that he respects women because he respects some women.
Working behind the camera made that structure more obvious to me, because directing and photography are not neutral acts. You decide who is worth looking at, how they will be looked at, which details become beautiful, which become grotesque and which are ignored. You can make someone more legible or less human with a lens. You can flatten a person into a type, or you can let contradiction survive.
That is why I am interested in the camera as a womb. A womb does not conquer what enters it. It changes because of what it receives. The metaphor suggests reciprocity. The subject affects the image.
The environment affects the filmmaker. The world is not simply harvested for content. It enters you, changes form, and emerges altered.
My relationship to vision makes this feel especially literal. I have cone dystrophy, a retinal condition that affects central vision and color perception. I do not take sight for granted. I am aware of seeing as an unstable privilege. That has never made me want smaller images. It has made me want enormous ones.
For a long time, disability was framed almost exclusively as absence. What can you not do? What function is diminished? What accommodation is required? Those questions are sometimes necessary, but they are aesthetically boring. They tell you almost nothing about what a disabled artist notices that someone else might miss. My vision has limitations, but it has also trained my attention. I care about contrast because contrast helps me see. I care about silhouette because silhouette carries information. I care about scale because scale can become emotional. I care about strong visual composition because weak visual information disappears.
This is one reason assisting Kurt Weston mattered to me. Weston continued making photographs after becoming legally blind, using adaptive technology and a visual language shaped by what remained available to him. His work refuses the idea that visual art belongs only to people with conventional vision. It also exposes how limited our imagination can be when we talk about disability. The question is not simply whether a blind or visually impaired person can make images. The better question is what kind of image becomes possible because that person sees differently.
The same question can be asked of women. What becomes possible when women are not only in front of the lens, but deciding where the lens goes? What changes when a woman who has been pedestalized, objectified, underestimated and watched gets to control the act of watching? What changes when the person constructing the image understands that beauty can be a source of power and a pretext for dismissal at the same time?
I do not think women automatically make kinder images. Women can reproduce the same hierarchies men do. Disabled filmmakers can make inaccessible work. Representation is not a magic moral solvent. But authorship changes when the range of people allowed to author expands. Perspective is not decorative. It affects form. I have often been told, implicitly and explicitly, that certain contradictions are inconvenient. A woman should not be too feminine if she wants to be taken seriously. A disabled person should not be too ambitious about spectacle.
A womb holds contradiction without immediately resolving it. It contains dependence and autonomy, vulnerability and force, interiority and transformation. The camera can do the same thing. It can take in a world that is messy, violent, erotic, funny, cruel, beautiful and politically compromised, and refuse to reduce it to one clean moral category.
We are living in a moment when images increasingly determine what people believe is real. Cameras are everywhere, but authorship is still not evenly distributed. The people who frame the world help decide what the world looks like, which bodies appear authoritative, which lives appear cinematic, and whose interiority is considered worth examining.
That is why it matters to me that more women and more disabled people direct. Not because we will all make the same work, and not because identity guarantees virtue. It matters because the world is shaped by images before it is shaped by arguments. Expanding who gets to create those images expands what can be imagined.
For me, directing is not the act of pointing a weapon at the world. It is the act of building a chamber strong enough to receive the world, hold it for a moment, transform it, and give it back.
The camera is a womb. What we choose to grow inside it matters.
