12 months, Hawkes sought to rectify this. She

 12 months, Hawkes sought to rectify this. She travelled around regional Victoria and her home of Melbourne photographing women aged 50 and above. All the women were to be 



ptotally nOverude, except – in many cases – for a prop, used to cover their faces, “to protect the women from their images being placed online and being trolled or losing their jobs,” she explains. “Some of the women were teachers or prison officers, and needed to be anonymous.”

The results of Hawkes’s work is a selection of 428 photographs called 500 Strong (500 portraits had been the aim until Covid got in the way). The work is on show as part of the Flesh After Fifty exhibition that opened in Melbourne on Sunday, a program which includes sculpture, multimedia, film and talks about changing perceptions of older women in art.
After Hawkes made the call-out for models, which was inclusive for trans and non-binary women, a wide range came forward. “People had all sorts of reasons to do it. Some people thought it was a lark, some people thought it was brave, some thought it was important just to be there, that older women should be celebrated.

“In the regions we had stock and station agents and graziers, another woman who came in on her way to buying a tractor, a woman carrying a rifle – she was a trap shooter,” she says.

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