This fine art photography project seeks to engage in a visual and conceptual dialogue with Gustave Courbet’s iconic painting The Origin of the World. Rather than replicating or confronting the anatomical precision of Courbet’s 19th-century gaze, my work reinterprets the subject through a contemporary, impressionistic lens.
Presented from the imagined perspective of a newborn, the series explores the female body — specifically the vulva — not as a fixed anatomical fact, but as a dreamlike, metaphorical portal. The visual language is intentionally blurry, fluid, and expressive, echoing the sensory disorientation of early life. I aim to capture not the body as it is seen, but as it is felt: warm, immense, intimate, and unknowable.
Photographed using a mix of soft focus, slow shutter speeds, and abstract framing, the images avoid literal representation in favour of visceral impression. These compositions evoke the hazy threshold between life and emergence, vulnerability and creation. The intention is not to illustrate the vagina, but to poetically honour it — to allow for a deeply subjective, emotional, and symbolic reading.
In reimagining The Origin of the World through this softened lens, the project challenges the clinical and voyeuristic traditions of depicting the female form. It proposes instead a visual space of reverence and ambiguity — where the viewer is invited not to study, but to feel.
Through this series, I hope to ignite conversation about perception, birth, sexuality, and the shifting nature of sight and meaning. This is not a work of confrontation, but of transformation — a reclaiming of origin as mystery, not definition.
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