Just Pretend I'm Not Here

Just Pretend I’m not Here, is an ongoing project exploring themes of gender, body image and femininity. 


What makes us female? How we dress, how much body hair we have, how we behave? How do we navigate the battle between conforming to a ridiculous standard of beauty / femininity, whilst also avoiding harassment? How do we wipe the male-gaze from ourselves? 



The first photo from the project was taken in 2015, I was visiting a friend, who was putting nail varnish remover on her nails and wrapping the ends of her fingers in tin foil in order to remove some nail colour gel. I thought about how much time we spend adding and removing things from ourselves in order to feel comfortable walking out into the world. Soon after I stopped removing hair from my body, I wanted to know how I looked as is. I was amazed at how much this affected my choice of clothing and how I presented myself generally.


I’m interested in how we as women present ourselves, the beauty in it, the time we spend on our appearance and the reasons why.

“I believe that gender is a spectrum. I believe that if we were allowed to be somewhere in the middle, not pushed to the extremes of performed masculinity and femininity, we would all be more free. I want to explore how to be something other than just what I’ve been assigned to be. I want to explore a more subversive sexuality, which goes further than what is expected of a woman in our patriarchal heteronormative society. I want to repeat the words “girl boy, woman man”, over and over, to find the limits of these words, against vastness of human experience. ANNA CALVI”