An Espresso with artist Jenny Lewis: Photographer on Collaboration, Women Midlife, and Identity
Head shot _ Self Portrait in the studio ©Jenny Lewis
Jenny Lewis is a London-based artist working with photography whose practice explores identity, women's health, and the underrepresented experiences of ageing. With over 30 years of creating truthful portraits, Lewis has developed a distinctive approach that combines documentary photography with deeply personal subject matter. Her work challenges societal invisibility around topics like giving birth, menopause, autoimmune diseases, and midlife transformation. In this conversation, Jenny discusses institutional support for artists, navigating the challenges of sustaining an artistic practice for three decades, and why she chose to make women central to her work through projects like ‘UnBecoming' and 'One Day Young’.
Midlife and Menopause in Contemporary Photography Works
The topic of women's midlife, including menopause, is absent from the narrative in contemporary art. How have you found the strength to make it central in your work?
I'm always looking at art to find myself, like when I became a mother, but I couldn't find myself when looking at artworks in museum collections. The language just wasn't there, and that's why I made those pictures. I had the urge to make what I needed to see, like the experience of midlife, which was about feeling completely lost and severed from myself, the loneliness, the isolation, but also the strength and resilience and positivity that come with midlife for women, the excitement and adventure of getting into a new phase, which is a no man's land. In ‘UnBecoming’, I had no desire to be in a picture, and when I did the self-portrait work, I had no desire to show it to anyone. I couldn't edit it for weeks. But I’ve also discovered that there is freedom in facing fear. When I look at my self-portrait now, I see resilience and strength, but pain too, which is part of life and also comes with being connected to people. It's not just fear.
Institutional Support and Sense of Validation
How meaningful are you finding the collaborations with institutions?
It’s great support when an institution supports your work. It’s an incredible validation to have an institution like the National Portrait Gallery say that my work is relevant in the history of photography and portraiture through acquisition. When I wanted to create work about women in midlife, touching on the menopause, vulnerability and autoimmune chronic health, I went to the Welcome Collection because I couldn't find what I wanted anywhere else. The Wellcome Collection acquired three of my existing works, and a while after the acquisition, they commissioned me to create work on the topic of the autoimmune system. It is a series on people with autoimmune diseases, which is a relatively under-researched area, with women been mainly affected in terms of genetic heredity of the conditions. Opportunities coming along after all those years of work, like being included in the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize exhibition in 2019, 2021 and 2023 at the NPG, are invaluable because it’s a real struggle to find the mentors that you need to pull you through and keep you going in the art world, either a patron or an institution supporting your work. You'd need an inner strength and belief, and I'm always flooded by self-doubt. Projects like UnBecoming took three years to develop and deepen, just to give you an idea time wise.
Navigating the Art World and Sustaining Creative Practice
What about overcoming obstacles and difficulties to keep doing your work?
You're almost always on the edge of stopping as an artist. I’ve been doing this for 30 years, I haven't really done anything else; there's some tenacity or stubbornness to continue with my work. Whenever I've got a bit lost in life, the language I have fallen back on is always photography and making pictures, which is how I’ve found strength. When I became a mother, I felt like I was losing my photographic voice and that my career was disappearing, but then I found my strength and confidence working on my project ‘One Day Young’. It consisted on taking individual portraits of 150 women who'd just had a baby on the day they had a baby back in their own homes. In photographing them, I was actually looking for myself and reflecting on my own experience, and indulging in the creative world helped me find myself again. Then I was lost again, and thanks to my project ‘A Hundred Years’, in celebrating other people, hearing about their hardships, what they go through, and their resilience, I found my way through once more.
Reflections on This Conversation
Speaking with Jenny revealed the courage required to create work about subjects that remain largely invisible in contemporary art. Her approach to photography as a language for self-discovery during life's most challenging transitions speaks to people at length.
Three key insights:
Institutional support sustains difficult work: Recognition from organisations like the National Portrait Gallery and Wellcome Collection provides crucial validation for exploring underrepresented subjects like women's health
Photography as personal navigation: Using the camera to document others' experiences becomes a way to understand and find strength through one's own life transitions
Creating what's missing matters: When representation doesn't exist in the art world, making that work yourself addresses both personal need and broader cultural gaps
Jenny's work demonstrates how portrait photography can become a vehicle for exploring vulnerability, resilience, and those overlooked experiences that connect women across.
Unbecoming_( Self Portrait) From the series UnBecoming ©Jenny Lewis
Curtain_From the series UnBecoming ©Jenny Lewis
Hospital Curtain_From the series UnBecoming ©Jenny Lewis
If you enjoyed this conversation, you might also like my interviews with other artists working with photography:
Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto in Elephant magazine
Carey Young on Photomonitor
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