Sidonie Marshall-Joly

I have spent my life looking at women. As a child it was my mum, watching her read, watching her put makeup on, watching her watch television. Later, it was my best friend Roxy. I photographed her over the space of a year, documenting her experience of girlhood in our small coastal town. My practice has grown out of a long-standing fascination with how a woman’s image can be rendered symbol: reproduced, categorised, converted into something that belongs to everyone. We are living through a moment in which the question of who owns a woman’s body, her image, her visibility, is continually urgent. I came to my current series Again and again, over and over through a set of pin-up negatives I found on eBay. Spending time with them in the darkroom felt like getting to know someone obsessively and intricately, and also like being complicit in something. I am reproducing her image too. I also photograph empty spaces: strip clubs, paper mills, recycling centres.  What I found, across every location, was that spaces hold weight even when no one is in them. They carry the shape of what usually happens there, the trace of bodies that have been and gone. My current series is interested in what keeps getting reproduced, who bears the cost of it, and what it means to look.