Notes from a Project on Femininity: Intimate Medium-Format Portraits
Date: December 20, 2024
A long-form reflection on intimacy, identity, and the medium-format gaze
The project I'm working on at the moment, as well as many projects I've tackled in the past, is dedicated to femininity was born from a personal urgency — the need to listen, observe, and give form to something that often escapes the rapid gaze of contemporary photography. Through medium-format film, I found a slower rhythm, a more human pace, something more respectful of the inner time of the people I photograph. In this work, femininity is never a closed concept or a fixed narrative: it is a living, shifting, multilayered presence.
From the beginning, I knew this would not be a traditional portrait project. I was not looking for iconic images or flawless poses. Instead, I sought a space where dialogue could emerge. With analog photography, every gesture is meditated: loading the camera, checking the light, approaching the person with the awareness that each frame carries weight. This slowness is not a limitation — it is a language. A form of respect.
Two examples of shots using
Pentax 67II - SMC Takumar 105mm - Kodak Tmax 400 film Processed in Xtol (1:1 @ 24°) standard
Scan from neg - © Niccolò Barone - All rights reserved
Scan from neg - © Niccolò Barone - All rights reserved
Medium format — 6×6, 6×7, and occasionally 4×5 — demands full presence. The camera is larger, slower, more physical. The frame forces a deeper kind of looking. And this intensity reshapes the relationship with the subject. You do not photograph to “get something”; you photograph to meet someone. This approach produces portraits that oscillate between strength and fragility, between declared identities and parts still in transformation.
During each session, the first thing that changes is time. There are no bursts, no immediate digital preview. No one checks themselves in the instant after the shutter is released. This creates a new kind of silence — a suspension that frees the subject from the need to perform. The person photographed begins to breathe at their own rhythm, without constantly monitoring their own image. The absence of digital review allows for something rare: trusting the moment.
Often we talk before beginning. About personal experiences, insecurities, desires, memories. Other times no words are needed: only the light entering through a window or the way a body settles into a room. Medium format registers all these nuances with emotional precision. The soft grain, the tonal transitions, the depth of the shadows — everything contributes to portraits that feel closer to memory than to simple depiction.
In this project, femininity is not an archetype. It appears as delicacy in a face that relaxes, as silent strength in a direct gaze, as vulnerability in an almost imperceptible gesture. Each encounter adds a new layer to a complex map that is never definitive. Photography becomes a way to welcome, not to define.
Pentax 67II - SMC Takumar 105mm - Portra 400 pushed to 800 iso - film Processed in C-41 standard
Scan from neg - © Niccolò Barone - All rights reserved
Light plays a fundamental role: I favor natural light, the kind that glides slowly across the face and body. A window, a curtain shifting slightly, an afternoon that drifts into blue. When I use artificial light, it is always continuous — I do not want to interrupt the emotional flow with a flash. Light must breathe, not break.
Over time, I realized that this project grows alongside me. It does not follow a calendar and has no clear beginning or end. It is an evolving emotional archive made of encounters, of photographs I did not know I would make, of stories I listened to as they took shape. Every roll of medium-format film is a fragment of a larger path, a chapter that belongs as much to me as to the person photographed.
On a technical level, choosing medium format creates an aesthetic that is increasingly sought after by those who want authentic images, far from digital perfection. Many brands, editorials, and artistic projects are returning to film for this very reason: it is not nostalgia, but visual truth. Medium format gives back skin, texture, air. It gives back presence.
Kodak Tmax 400 in Kodak Xtol 1:1 @24° - Graflex Speed graphic and Kodak Aeroektar 178mm
Ultimately, Notes from a Project on Femininity is a journey of listening. It is an attempt to approach something that cannot be explained, only shared. Through intimate, slowly constructed portraits, I try to give voice to an idea of femininity that does not claim to be universal but embraces complexity, fragility, and the quiet power of each individual. In a world that consumes images at increasing speed, analog medium-format photography offers the possibility to do the opposite: to slow down.
© Niccolò Barone - All rights reserved