Maybe to look at what six decades of use and abuse looks like in my case. So why did I opt to do this? Maybe because no one had ever asked before. “This is the only time I have been photographed naked. The final count ended up at about 420 after the project took longer than expected and the budget ran out. Set in the broader Flesh After Fifty program, the idea for Hawkes’ exhibition, 500 Strong, was to take nude portraits of 500 women. The program was so named after a quote from the famous Magnum agency photographer Eve Arnold, who wrote about photographing actress Joan Crawford in New York in the 1950s: “There she was nude – but sadly, something happens to flesh after 50.” We really needed to change the message for younger women about what it is to become an older woman.” “Those two words in combination there is nothing good about them. “I have been struck over the years by how much their fear of becoming an ‘old woman’ added to the distress of the experience,” Hickey says. I got my identity back.” Credit: Ponch Hawkes I removed ‘victim’ and replaced it with a strong woman who loves her body and self. I jumped into the Flesh After Fifty project with this force. I was ready to shed my skin, find myself. 'I’d recently left a 36-year relationship that involved domestic abuse. Hickey’s clinical area is menopause, and many of her patients are women facing early menopause. The project began as a health initiative, the brainchild of Martha Hickey, a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Melbourne and Royal Women’s Hospital.

“For every woman, it’s on your mind, the question of body image and body hatred, and there isn’t any material about that for older women.” For a society preoccupied with the female body, interest drops off precipitously after 50. Hawkes hit on this surprising corner of the internet when she was commissioned to take 500 portraits of women over the age of 50 – an act she didn’t recognise as radical until she realised how few such images existed. Immersion in a dance and movement practice has finally enabled me to land in my skin.” Credit: Ponch Hawkes Now I am honouring it, appreciating it, taking care of it. “I grew up with a sense of shame about my physical appearance. Then you look more, and you find 500,000 images of ‘Young man f…ing old woman’.” “The whole panorama, from the 50s onwards – there wasn’t anything,” she says. When photographer Ponch Hawkes went looking for images of naked older women on the internet, she found acres of blank space, then a rich vein of what’s termed “granny porn”.

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