A gaze can wound, but it can also create space. Photographer and filmmaker Josephine Meng opens such spaces: places where emotion, intimacy, and authenticity outweigh the surface. Based between Berlin and Los Angeles, she moves between photography, film and creative direction, spanning editorials, music videos, and campaigns. She has collaborated with Maison Margiela and Chrome Hearts, directed music videos, and photographed musicians and actors – yet labels dissolve in her imagery. What remains is a signature language of nostalgia and cinematic imagination.

Influenced by vintage cinema, Old Hollywood, and the tactile process of shooting on film, Meng’s images resist the flatness of glossy surfaces. They linger – grainy, dreamy, human. Whether portrait, staged scenario, or fleeting moment, her work searches for emotional truth over spectacle. She offers a way of looking not about possession, but about connection.

vakuum spoke to her about the Female Gaze, about collaboration and history, about what it means to imagine images beyond replication.

To me it doesn’t just mean seeing women through the eyes of women. It’s more about the space it creates for emotional depth, and authenticity. I do care about physical appearance in my photography but it needs to be transmitted through emotion and connection and that’s where the Female Gaze is important to me. That hopefully invites you to explore characters not as passive subjects of desire but as whole, complex beings. I never really think about my gender until it’s brought up to me as a defining characteristic or a door is closed in my face because of it.

I practise being present, listen to music and watch movies to spark my imagination. I always have some kind of fantasy running through my head or a stream of scenarios that keep it interesting. And then something usually sparks. I write a lot down. Sometimes it’s a mood, a piece of dialogue, a song that hits me at the right moment.

I can’t think of a specific event, but being able to travel alone at a young age definitely shaped me. It taught me how to observe, how to be quiet and attentive. When you’re young and on your own in a place you don’t know, you notice atmosphere, gestures, the way light changes. Those things stay with me when I shoot.

It’s kind of about the interior world where diversity comes in for my photography. I’m less interested in ticking boxes. It’s more about how people carry their emotions, their fantasies, their fragility or their strength, and how I can give that space to unfold.

It depends. I spend a lot of time preparing and constructing a scenario and I write everything down. Sometimes in collaboration with the character, other times they are into me creating a look they didn’t think of. In those cases, I place them in a setting and let them naturally embody the character. I want everything to feel real.

Women in contemporary photography have played a vital but often overlooked role. Helen Levitt for example was kind of the blueprint for color street photography, but now when you think of this type of photography William Eggleston or some other male photographer comes to mind first because her contributions were overshadowed. The same for Dorothy Arzner and Vivian Maier – so many women were trailblazers. The pattern of being overshadowed reflects the larger issue of women’s achievements being minimized. Women’s roles are essential in expanding the way we view the world. They bring their own unique sensibilities to storytelling that can’t be replicated or fully understood from a male perspective.

It’s nice if a model brings whatever they go through and goes through it as I capture it. I shoot on film and that process is slower and more deliberate and helps shape an emotional tone. Film forces me to be intentional, to slow down and connect with the moment.

I am miserable for a few days or weeks and then I try and leave the environment I’m in in the hope it will go away. That’s not very helpful advice. But sometimes you just need to step outside of your own patterns.

At the moment that would be street photography from 1940 to 1980, especially American. There’s such an honesty in those decades of work – something raw and unscripted that I really admire.

Not just in photography but in any art form, where people give credit and support one another rather than replicate or rip off another. I think it’s about shifting from competition to recognition, from erasure to acknowledgment.

Don’t replicate someone else, go outside and get inspired by things that aren’t photographs. Look at life, at films, at music, at the world moving around you. Your voice will come from that.

Josephine Meng’s images are not declarations, but invitations. They leave room for complexity, silence, contradiction. They do not claim to own the gaze. They offer it back, as a shared space, fragile and unforced. Her work asks us to pause, to linger in what is unresolved, to embrace emotion as texture. Perhaps this is what the Female Gaze might become: a way of looking less about capturing, and more about opening, less about control, and more about connection.