from the inside: what about me?
This image is an invocation of the silenced self: a guttural scream from within the womb, where the woman becomes both the container and the contained. Blurred and veiled by the walls of the womb, the body appears submerged, trapped, spectral. The figure’s hands press against the barrier in protest, as if against an ultrasound, an image that is too often used to define her before she’s allowed to define herself.
This piece captures the internalized, searing rage that arises in response to the question: “But what about the fetus?” a question that erases the human being. It forces the viewer into the embodied claustrophobia of being reduced to reproductive potential. The light fractures across her skin like pulses, suggesting both divinity and violation. There is a scream, but no sound, only the visual echo of autonomy denied.
The photograph merges the aesthetics of the sacred and the clinical: it is ultrasound, baptism, drowning, rebirth. It invites discomfort. It demands a reckoning. In turning the lens inward -literally placing the viewer “inside” the body- it confronts the violence of expectation, the quiet horror of being made sacred only when stripped of choice. This work is not just about rage. It is about witnessing, and what we are witnessing today. About remembering that inside every argument about life, there is already one, gasping to be heard, to be seen.
from the inside: caged
Caged, inside and out. Pushing on every edge for a way out. This body is not still, it’s knocking. Pressing. Searching. Every inch a question: is this the door that opens? The surface warps like tissue, sharp like glass, but never gives. The walls don’t just surround- they respond. They push back. They name this containment protection, but it stunts: growth, autonomy, movement, held in fluid suspension. What if there’s no exit? What if we’re meant to bloom in place, punished for wanting more than this?
Our mobility is an illusion. Choice is conditional. This isn’t about safety, it’s about control, the dichotomy of being a woman. This image is what it feels like to knock on every door and hear silence. To stretch beyond your own skin and still be told: not yet. Not yours. Not now.
from the inside: gilded
The “golden cage” is a profound paradox- its radiant glow symbolizes promise, creation, and the miracle of life, yet it simultaneously acts as a barrier, restricting and defining a woman’s identity through the narrow lens of fertility and motherhood. This gilded enclosure, beautiful and revered, becomes a prison of expectation, where worth is measured by the ability to give life.
Behind this translucent, textured red wall swims a blurred figure, ambiguous, obscured, yet present, embodying the complex tension of womanhood. She is both celebrated for her creative power and quietly weighed down by the invisible walls that confine her autonomy and individuality. The blurred edges evoke a sense of loss of clarity, hinting at the internal struggle between selfhood and societal roles imposed from without. without identification, but many may identify with.
The image’s warm, golden light and layered textures recall the ethereal, haunting quality of an ultrasound scan, an intimate glimpse inside a womb, a space of potential and vulnerability. This visual metaphor invites viewers to reflect on how the miraculous process of life-giving can also cage and limit, offering a meditation on the contradictions and complexities that define many women’s experiences.
from the inside: inception
She floats in stillness, wide-eyed, her hands pressed gently against a translucent barrier. Her womb glows softly from within, casting blinding light across her form, but the light does not free her. It reveals the layers she is suspended inside. A womb within a womb.
The image holds her in recursive confinement, layered, veiled, and silenced. She is not panicked, but curious. Her body is lit by something internal, yet her movement is muted, like sound underwater. She reaches toward the walls, not to break through, but to understand them.
This is another visualization of the grand themes of the vignette: that what gives life also holds us still. Her own body is the source of the glow, and still it becomes her cage. Not through violence, but through quiet architecture. Through inherited form. Through the invisible structures we are born into and often never have the privilege of leaving behind. It is about being nested. Witnessing, from the inside, the beauty and weight of being the container and the contained.
I often ponder generational trauma, as a first-gen American and descent of Sikhs who fled genocide, and the strange fact that the all eggs my body has were inside my mother at one point, an the egg I came from was once in my grandmother, This inception of time holds deep power and the begs the question of what must stop and what must continue. It’s not just about being born, it’s about realizing you’ve always been inside something.
from the inside: fluid
From the inside, everything drips with possibility. The dreaminess of wombhood- the blurred edges, the soft suspension- is seductive. Here, the liquid becomes both cocoon and cage. It represents fluidity, a shapelessness that could become anything. But even water holds you down when there’s nowhere to swim.
This is the first moment in the series where her face is clearly visible. Eyes open. Calm, but searching. The anonymity of body gives way to identity. We are no longer floating in abstraction, we are with her. Witnessing her quiet awareness of the walls that hold her in. She is neither passive nor resisting. Just there. Breathing under pressure. Waiting for form, for rupture, for choice.
from the inside: through the blood, who are you looking for?
This image is a confrontation. The topic is layered, messy, bloody, ugly, and beautiful all at once. Why are you here? Why do you care? For yourself? For your future offspring? Or for her?
The blood spills between us like a boundary and a bridge, a raw, primal pulse that cannot be ignored. It forces the question: who is being seen, and who remains invisible? Who is searching inside this chaos? This is not a gentle moment. It demands honesty. It challenges the viewer to reckon with their own reasons for looking, for caring, and for witnessing.
from the inside: light within
Unlike from the inside: inception, which dwells on the recursion of womb within womb, from the inside: light within captures a moment of motion and emerging vision. The figure is moving forward, though the path is uncertain, the direction is clear. There is no stasis here, but only the pulse of progress.
The soft glow inside her suggests an internal light guiding her steps, a beacon that radiates from deep within but doesn’t yet reveal the destination. Yet beneath that light, there is rage, quiet but undeniable. A fierce energy that propels her forward, refusing to be contained. She is not trapped in layers, but moving through them,
moving toward something unseen yet inevitable. This image is about forward momentum, inner guidance, trusting visions, and the burning fire beneath calm surfaces, even when the outside world remains blurry and daunting: we burn like firebrands.
from the inside: taste of freedom
From the womb, the desolate quiet flows peacefully; the freedom found in the silence, bred to incubate growth. But who am I on the outside? For there is where I am destined to grow.
She leans into the barrier, tongue pressed to the blurred, opaque wall. It’s a quiet defiance, a curious hunger. The gesture is intimate, childlike, but layered with something deeper: a need to experience the world beyond confinement, to taste it before she is allowed to live it. Her body is soft-edged, suspended in the calm. And yet, the act of licking the wall transforms the stillness. This is not surrender- it is a sensory rebellion. A moment of contact with the outside from within. She does not yet know what waits for her, only that she is meant to go there. This image holds that in-between: the last breath of silence before becoming, a taste of the future.
breakthrough: 24k
The first image of the second part of the series, breakthrough: here we have a much clearer view of the womb, as if we are inside with the body. The figure faces the other direction, closer to a birthing position with her head down, her form softly illuminated in glowing gold. The light reveals the gentle curves of her body pressed inward, a quiet tension in the stillness.
This image is clearer and brighter, contrasting sharply with the darker, more blurred themes of from the inside: gilded, where the “golden cage” appeared distant, darker and opaque. Here, the cage feels softer, more immediate, illuminating the paradox of beauty and confinement. The piece captures the juxtaposition of womanhood: commanding power and imbuing delicacy, softness layered with strength.
As we move through the series, the body and mind shift, drawing closer to birth, each image a step toward emergence, revealing the womb as both sanctuary and cage, clarity and complexity coexisting in luminous tension.
breakthrough: all hands on deck
This image confronts the raw, clinical reality of birth- the moment when the body becomes a vessel under relentless scrutiny and intervention. Countless hands move over her body as if she were nothing more than a delicate fruit being opened to reach the seed within. My femininity is my lifeline, a precious core I clutches close to her heart, yet it is paradoxically the very thing that leaves me vulnerable.
Being “plugged in” to womanhood, stripped of individuality and agency, the image exposes the routine nature of this invasive process, an experience repeated on countless bodies, often without regard for the woman behind it. It evokes the tension between being a sacred giver of life and a clinical object, highlighting the loss of control and the quiet surrender demanded by the system. The photograph is a powerful reckoning as it serves as a call to witness the embodied struggle beneath the clinical calm. It challenges the viewer to see beyond the sterile procedures to the fiercely human experience: a breakthrough not just of birth, but of autonomy, identity, and self-possession.
breakthrough: flutter
The top half of her body pushes upward from dark blue water, tense and strained, breaking through a heavy silence. Wrapped tightly by a vivid red cord, the constriction bites into her skin, serving as a sharp reminder of the pain and limits imposed on her.
Her gaze lifts off-frame, wide-eyed, caught in a moment between discomfort and yearning. This flutter is both the fragile tremor of pain and the subtle first stirrings that signal new life: the same flutter others feel when they begin to carry a life.
The dark water cradles her like a womb while her struggle to break free embodies the raw tension between discomfort and hope. breakthrough: flutter is the trembling pulse of endurance, the first breath of resistance, and the fragile beginnings of transformation.
breakthrough: fetal- would u care more if it was me?
She curls tightly in fetal position beneath dark, enveloping water, the umbilical cord wrapped around her body, a visceral symbol of connection and constraint. Her intent gaze meets the viewer’s directly, carrying the silent, urgent question: Would you care more if it was me? If it was me swimming around my womb, bound yet alive, would they want different for me?
This question reverberates through the image, challenging the viewer to move beyond abstraction and see the living, breathing person beneath. It asks us to reckon with how much we truly care, how deeply we see those who are often invisible: vulnerable yet alive, contained yet present, she embodies the tension between survival and surrender. The piece is a powerful invitation to imagine another reality, one where care is not conditional, and where life is valued fully, simply because it is.
breakthrough: push
Legs splayed wide, exposed and raw, caught in the violent push of becoming. The red cord wraps around her body, a binding grip that constricts even as she fights to break free. Her face is twisted in discomfort and fierce defiance, eyes locking directly with the viewer, demanding recognition of her struggle.
This is a moment of relentless tension, between the weight that holds her down and the unstoppable force driving her upward. It is not birth, but a brutal act of rebirth: the physical and emotional rupture needed to reclaim agency, to shatter silence, to emerge. breakthrough: push does not ask for sympathy: it demands witness to the pain, the power, and the raw humanity of transformation.
rebirth: unplug
From above, the figure crawls on a moss-covered floor, her head unseen, only the curve of her back and legs visible, bent low and close to the earth. The red cord emerges from between her legs, a visceral reminder of connection and release.
This image captures the raw, primal moment of unplugging, as the severing of ties not only to the womb but to the expectations and definitions imposed on womanhood. Crawling on the moss, she returns to nature’s embrace, reclaiming autonomy by letting go of the confining narratives that have shaped her identity. As the final section of the series, it marks the culmination of this journey: a fragile, fierce emergence grounded in the natural origin of self and the freedom found in release.
rebirth: on the run
In this final image, she crawls away from the viewer, her back and full body visible, face turned away, unseen but purposeful. The earth beneath her is soft moss, a living, breathing floor that grounds her raw, determined movement. With no cord to bind her, she moves untethered, propelled by a fierce momentum born of release.
This moment captures the urgent, restless energy of a woman reclaiming her body and identity, no longer confined by the invisible cages of expectation, biology, or imposed roles. She is on the run, not from safety, but toward autonomy, breaking through the silence and boundaries that once held her still.
Her crawl speaks to endurance and transformation: the difficult, powerful journey of emerging beyond what was defined for her, toward what she chooses to become. The natural world beneath her embraces this freedom, reflecting a return to the source—a rebirth grounded in raw, untamed selfhood.
Inspired by photographer Erika Kamano, rebirth: on the run is a visual anthem of movement and liberation, the fragile strength in forging a new path beyond inherited stories, and the relentless drive to live beyond the limits placed on womanhood. It is the final chapter in a series that honors the struggle and grace of becoming fully, fiercely free.