The female gaze: three photographers capturing life on their own terms

Lois & Carey by Rona Bar. This is part of a series exploring the intersection of familial love, queerness, Jewishness and womanhood (Credit: Rona Bar)[Missing Credit]

Enter their photo series, Lois & Carey, which was exhibited at Saatchi Gallery in 2025 and for which Bar won the Women in Art 2025 Eve Arnold Photography Award. Set within the home of a Jewish mother and daughter, both artists living in London, the series explores the intersection of familial love, queerness, Jewishness and womanhood through vivid and sometimes shocking portraits taken over the course of a year.

In the most striking photo, Lois stands in the kitchen wearing a blue latex mask and underwear, the bra imprinted with the Magen David, while her mother sits at the table in the background.

“Lois tattoos her mother, which is a very unique thing on its own, so we just said that we wanted to be there to photograph that,” Bar says. “But then to see the way they present their Judaism and the way they treat their roots, through a creative way that feeds them, was really inspiring to me, so we just kept coming back.”

Though the series’ portrayal of Jewishness marked a new theme in Bar’s work, its depiction of non-conformist, often nude bodies does not. In 2023, she and Avshalom completed a photo book called Us, which documented naked couples of various ages, races, genders, sexualities and body types in their homes. It was an intimate portrait of genuine human relationships, made all the more profound by its representation of subjects who were not models.

“I thought I wanted to be a fashion photographer for a long time, but dealing with my own body issues since I was young and growing up in the 2000s with everything we saw in the media, I felt if I want to be part of the industry or even just make art, it’s part of my duty to change that narrative,” she says. “And frankly, it’s much more interesting to work with real bodies and real people.”

Rona Bar (Credit: Rona Bar)[Missing Credit]

Indeed, real people form the foundation of Bar’s work, despite or perhaps thanks to their uncanny quirks. Because although she wants her photography to feel “a bit elusive in the sense that you can’t pinpoint it to a place or time”, it remains grounded in the specificity of human diversity.

“I’m very much motivated by storytelling and exploration of identity and people,” Bar says.

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Chloe Delmonte

While most of the world only ever sees Jews in their lowest moments, Chloe Delmonte gets to see them at their happiest.

And for this London-based wedding and simchah photographer, nobody does joy quite as well as Jews.

“The Jewish weddings that I photograph are always the most jubilant,” says Delmonte. “I see these young Jewish couples on the dance floor, having the most unbelievable, exuberant Jewish experience, and it’s this reminder that we’re a really special group of people who just know how to celebrate life.” Delmonte, whose career began by snapping photos at friends’ weddings, has been in the business of capturing life’s landmark moments for more than 15 years. In that time, she’s photographed major life events for Jews and non-Jews alike, but it’s the Jewish celebrations that Delmonte always finds most poignant.

Jewish joy in a wedding photograph by Chloe Delmonte (Credit: Chloe Delmonte)[Missing Credit]

“I feel like the one thread through every phase of Jewishness in my life has always been the joy and the community,” she says. “Our history is peppered with all sorts of things to overcome, but at simchahs we don’t focus on that. We really embrace the sentiment of the Shehecheyanu, which is this amazing way of expressing gratitude for the blessings in life, despite everything.”

That’s why Delmonte’s favourite part of photographing Jewish weddings is always the dance floor, the central hub for frenetic displays of joy.

“I feel like it’s probably looked the same for millennia, just wild and sweaty and free and full of life across all ages,” she says.
“There’s always an amazing 90-year-old grandma who’s had some wine and she gets on the dance floor and she’s just loving life.”

Delmonte describes her photography style as “soft, but also really vivacious,” which she achieves by giving the in-between, behind-the-scenes moments of the day as much consideration as the big show-stopping moments.

“It’s less about the perfectly framed image and more about capturing the feeling of the day,” she says.

Chloe Delmonte (Credit: Chloe Delmonte)[Missing Credit]

Part of capturing the feeling includes, for Delmonte, shooting largely on film for the cinematic quality it lends the photos. But her use of film photography, especially for weddings, goes even further than aesthetics; the actual process of developing photos strikes Delmonte as metaphorically significant.

“It’s a very tangible thing: you get the negatives back from the lab and they’ve been printed and scanned using light in a dark room and that’s how a photograph on a negative is made; a hole in the camera, which is the lens, opens for a split second, lets all the light through in certain places, and literally creates a physical shadow on this negative and that’s the image,” Delmonte says. “I always find that to be so romantic in terms of documenting a wedding, because it’s literally the light from the day and the moment etched into this material and then you have that physical mark of the world forever.”

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Michal Chelbin

Michael Chelbin has always been drawn to staged photos, but only recently has she begun to realise that it might have something to do with her father.

He was a Holocaust survivor. After the war, he moved to Israel with his mother and her husband, whom she met and married in a German refugee camp in the aftermath of the Shoah. Chelbin’s father was 16 when he learned this man was not his biological dad, who had actually been killed by the Nazis early in the war. The only evidence of his biological father was a collection of photographs – which remained stowed away in the same family home Chelbin later grew up in.

Dima and Sergey, Ukraine 2006 (Credit: Michal Chelbin)[Missing Credit]

“They were these very staged pictures from the 1920s, early 20th century, and it was in those old pictures that my father was always looking for his roots, never believing for sure whether the guy he saw in the photo could really be his father,” says Israel-based photographer Chelbin. “I remember growing up on those memories and pictures and, in some way, I think it affected how I stage my own photos now.”

Unsmiling adolescents, usually in uniform or costume, make up the bulk of Chelbin’s personal photography projects, which have been compiled into four published monographs and exhibited in art museums across the globe. From small-town circus performers to pregnant prison inmates to teenagers in military boarding schools around Ukraine and Russia, Chelbin’s subjects are often young people from the margins, captured staring into her camera lens in moments of sombre repose.

“I’m interested in taking these uniformed people out of context, in staging a surreal moment, because I think I’m always drawn to a place where fantasy meets reality,” she says. “What really interests me is to create my own world.”

Cio, Georgia 2021 (Credit: Michal Chelbin)[Missing Credit]

Though she has an impressive CV of editorial work, which recently included photographing Eli Sharabi for the cover of Time magazine, Chelbin’s personal projects are the true outlet for her creativity, not to mention an opportunity for escapism.

“After October 7 I got a lot of assignments from international magazines, and I took a lot of pictures of hostages and their families,” Chelbin says. “It was very intense for a year at least, and at a certain point I realised that I needed to do something different to clear my mind – I needed to get out of here in order to be more creative.”

She travelled to China and Japan to work on a photo series documenting young people engaging in cultural rituals, which she plans to publish as the subject of her fifth book. Chelbin has also been photographing the Batsheva Dance Company for the past several years as part of an ongoing exploration of movement.

“I think I found something in photography that makes me strong,” says Chelbin, who still thinks about the mystery of those old photos her father used to ruminate over. “Behind the lens, I always felt that I had more power.” t