Preserve Me

Influenced by Ada Limón’s poem The Vulture & The Body

This series looks at the body under the weight of expectation the way a woman learns to hold herself together in a world that is always asking her to be less or more, but never simply herself. The figure in these photographs are wrapped and veiled, caught in the quiet tension between being seen and being consumed. Their stillness is not serenity; it is survival.

The emotional weight of Ada Limón’s The Vulture & The Body echoes through these images, the sense of being pulled by forces larger than the self. The media teaches women how they are “allowed” to age but often at the cost of their autonomy and anatomy. The fabric becomes a kind of leash, a thin boundary between the body and the expectations that bind it.

Yet within the restraint, there is resistance. The body presses back. Light clings to skin. Breath insists on itself. The figure becomes both fragile and enduring, a reminder that aging is not a failure of beauty but a record of survival. Like a flower the petals get burned by the sun, colors begin to shift, forms preserved and transformed at once.