In her latest series, Our Bodies, Ourselves, photographer Jean Karotkin focuses on the multi-generational struggle among all women to be seen and heard and granted the fundamental human rights men enjoy with regards to making decisions about their own bodies.

The images in this series, which is named after the seminal 1968 text from the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, feature individual women who appear pregnant and chained to an impeccably dressed mannequin – a stand-in for the judicial predilections of the (mostly) men who have been granted agency over women’s reproductive health care. The female subjects, which include the artist, run the gamut in terms of age, ethnicity, gender, and background. Each is meant to reflect a singular life as well as a collective imperative for personal freedom.

Karotkin conceived of this project as a response to the global offensive against women's autonomy. While in prior photographic series the artist used long exposure times and the resulting translucence to call attention to the experience of women being looked through rather than at as they age, here, she uses the effect to convey the fundamentally unpossessable nature of women’s bodies and minds. That some of the subjects appear to be disappearing is intended to simultaneously spotlight and combat pervasive attempts at erasure – of women’s individual narratives, their universal plight, and, in this current political climate, of hard-earned legislation.

Our Bodies, Ourselves serves as testimony to this particularly fraught moment in time. As a growing body of work that will ultimately include the full and beautiful spectrum of all those who identify with womanhood, it is also a tool for countering the ideologies of the aggressors in this current assault on women’s rights. Their victory relies on the total disregard of varying perspectives, including Karotkin’s, which she, like all artists, asserts through her work, making the escalating infringements on women’s personal freedoms that are much harder to ignore.