死と入り口 | AnOther

This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue of AnOther Magazine: 

Among the earliest and most famous depictions of a female nude is the Venus of Willendorf. 

There are many Venuses, a broad – and obviously retrospective – nomenclature for figurines originating from the Upper Palaeolithic period, dating back 10,000 to 40,000 years. The Venus of Willendorf is carved in oolitic limestone. Standing a mere 11.1 centimetres tall, she is reputedly 30,000 years old. She has swollen breasts and a protuberant belly, both suggestive of pregnancy. Many thousands of words have been written about her. Is she, in fact, pregnant? Is she an ancient fertility doll, designed to be held in the hand of prospective or birthing mothers? Is she not pregnant at all but a symbol of beauty as it was perceived at that time? Also conjecture: the perspective of this Venus and more than a few of her Venus sisters, the fact that she has no facial features, or indeed feet, has led some to surmise that her creator was female – she is a self-portrait. Of course, nothing is proven. The issues this little Venus’s provenance raises, though, seem pertinent now for Harley Weir, whose exploration of the female form – and just the female – including her own, has led to some of the most striking and evocative imagery of the past decade. 

In the history of art, depictions of pregnant women are few and far between. They are predominantly seen through the eyes of male artists. Their bodies are either hidden – through the medieval and Renaissance periods it was the fashion for women to wear voluminous clothing – or idealised. The Madonna is the most prevalent of all pregnant females in art history – the mother of all art historical clichés? – and her baby’s conception was immaculate. In myriad portrayals, myriad Annunciations, that purity is signified by the presence of a white dove. Of that same era, for many years critics speculated that the female figure in Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait (1434) was pregnant. Emblems of fertility – a carving of Saint Margaret of Antioch on a chair by the bed, ripe oranges, a symbol of prosperity but also fecundity, on the windowsill – are present in the painting’s background. The fullness of her famous green dress has since been attributed to the extravagance of its fabrication, however. Three-dimensional laser scans of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503–17) captured some 20 years ago now are not so easily dismissed. A fine gauze veil – or guarnello – seen over her dress, until that point hidden by aged varnish on the painting’s surface, is typical of those worn by soon-to-be or new mothers of that time. Representation of pregnant nudes in classical painting, meanwhile, are likely negative. Titian’s masterpiece Diana and Callisto (1556–59), which hangs in the National Gallery in London, is the best known. Nymph Callisto’s shaming, the revelation of her naked, pregnant body and subsequent fall from chastity, is subject to the goddess Diana’s fierce disapproval. Raped by Jupiter, Callisto was later transformed into a bear by that god’s wife, Juno. Or so the story goes.

A few centuries on, and modern artists from Gustav Klimt to Pablo Picasso and Lucian Freud painted (and sculpted) pregnant women, but always – inevitably – from a distance. Klimt’s Hope paintings, dated 1903 and 1907–08, of his favourite model Herma were executed against her better judgment, and the earlier rendition, portraying her naked surrounded by mythical monsters, caused a scandal. Picasso’s 1950 sculpture La Femme Enceinte was inspired by his partner at the time, Françoise Gilot, who had recently given birth to their second child, Paloma; he used ceramic bowls and pitchers to create the figure’s rounded breasts and stomach. Freud’s portraits of pregnant women, some carrying his own children, were forensic in their attention to detail: the subject as specimen. 

It wasn’t until the last century that female artists’ representations of pregnancy began to enter the gallery setting. Paula Modersohn-Becker’s nude self-portrait of an imaginary pregnancy in 1906, Alice Neel’s paintings of pregnant women, clothed and nude, in the Sixties and Seventies and Chantal Joffe’s pregnant self-portraits are impassioned in their bid for reclamation, showing not only pregnancy’s beauty and power but also its complexity. For the first time, there is a sense of women’s alienation from their own bodies antepartum, for their feelings of intense love alongside, and never unreasonably, fear.

Harley Weir is no stranger to the self-portrait. Her 2022 Beauty Papers monograph, dedicated to “all the dolls in the world”, is an unflinchingly visceral – at times grotesque – representation of the tropes of femininity and the preconceptions those raise. Four years on, and ten weeks pregnant, Weir began to regularly take pictures of herself naked or near-naked in the relative privacy of her bedroom. At 32 weeks a further, more studied series was taken, including portraits of Weir, now helped by John Kelleher, her husband and the father of the baby, and of a body double wearing a pregnancy belly and Harley Weir mask. With styling by her friend and longtime collaborator Georgia Pendlebury, these images serve as Weir’s visual response to her physical and emotional transition at a time that may be as challenging as it is joyful. And intimate, but: “The real private self isn’t this though,” she says. “It’s still a performance, especially in a self-portrait.”

SUSANNAH FRANKEL Do you know the Venus of Willendorf? She’s got no feet. People think a woman may have made her.

HARLEY WEIR Because she’s looking down at her body? I’ve been documenting my pregnancy from week ten and there are a lot of looking-down pictures and also looking up in the mirror. When you’re pregnant there are so many blind spots. My husband helped take many of the pictures for that reason. The series is called Death and Entrances because, from what I’ve read, it’s like an ego death. You’re giving birth but you’re also dying, you change. I felt, physically in this story, as if I was wearing a disguise. 

That’s something I think connects back to the Venus of Willendorf, this idea of a woman looking down at a body that is powerful, but also unfamiliar. During pregnancy, your body becomes the most visible thing about you, but at the same time it can feel like it no longer belongs. Here, I don’t have my usual breasts, I don’t have my usual stomach. I felt almost free from the shame of being nude because the bump isn’t me or us.

SF The physical state of pregnancy is extreme. We are taught from an early age to control our bodies and our body image. When you’re pregnant, you surrender that control. Perhaps your body is preparing you for becoming a mother, because once that happens your life is not your own in the same way.

HW Yes, it feels like that. It feels good. I’ve always been self-conscious about my breasts because they were so small. Now they are engorged and full of stretchmarks, but I don’t care who sees them. They’ve become functional objects. And there’s a safety in that. I feel much more at ease. I love being this blob that will bring purpose to someone new and it in turn gives my body purpose, a reason for its irregular shapes that before felt like deformities. 

SF Is there any fear involved?

HW There was a lot more at the beginning. But I’m still at the stage where you don’t really know what’s about to hit. I’m in the phase where I feel this is the baby, it’s this bump. But no, the baby is going to come out and rock my world. 

SF Have you looked at the way pregnant women are represented in art?

HW I haven’t seen much pregnant art – especially from the past. There’s the Virgin Mary, but we rarely see her pregnant. She didn’t even have sex. The virgin and the mother. 

SF There’s that – the Christian ideal – but also some quite violent portrayals. 

HW I have to say I can’t think of one classical painting where you see a pregnant woman. Klimt maybe. My mother talks a lot about how, even when she was younger, you had to cover the bump up, you couldn’t show it freely. I feel now we’re having a renaissance for mothers. The mother is more celebrated. I didn’t feel secure enough to be having a kid until now. And I’m getting on. I’ll be 38 when it comes out.

SF People called me a geriatric mother. I was 37.

HW But they’ve changed it now.

SF Are you not geriatric?

HW I would have been, but they stopped using that term recently, which is great. I do think this is an amazing moment for mothers. On Instagram there are so many inspirational women sharing their motherhood stories. Once you get pregnant your algorithm knows and they’re everywhere. So many cool mothers online, which I feel is something you wouldn’t have seen in the early Noughties. Mothers were dismissed or hidden. There was the fear of overpopulation and that having children was bad for the environment,
I used to hear that a lot. Now in the west fewer people are having babies, pregnancy is a positive thing again. It goes in cycles, I suppose. I’ve just finished reading Born [The Untold History of Humanity by Lucy Inglis]. It’s fascinating how attitudes shift. During the Roman Empire, people would kill unwanted babies, by “exposure” – especially girls. 

SF In China and Japan they are now rolling out financial incentives to persuade people to have babies. 

HW Exactly. First China wasn’t allowing more than one baby. Now there aren’t enough. For now, it feels like we’re in a baby-positive cycle.

SF The death part of the equation is the old you saying goodbye to your old life.

HW And saying hello to the mystery of what is about to begin. I have already said goodbye to my old body. It’s all very physical now. The changes being made are visual, my insides are yet to be rebirthed.

SF You’ve photographed yourself before. How much of that process is about showing yourself to the world and how much is it about introspection, working out what, in this case, your pregnancy means for you?

“I have already said goodbye to my old body. It’s all very physical now. The changes being made are visual, my insides are yet to be rebirthed” – Harley Weir

HW My life is already very bump-forward. Wherever I go, it’s the focal point of conversation. It’s hard not to be obsessed by the pregnancy. At one point people argued that because the baby takes so much nutrition, the mother’s brain shrinks by 20 per cent. Now they are calling it rewiring. I’m rewiring. And my way of coping with things is photography – it’s like therapy. It’s a way for me to work out those ideas and also to detach from them. I was thinking how I’m kissing goodbye to this flat-chested girl and becoming a woman. The pregnancy at this stage is visual, the changes are reflected in the mirror. Every Wednesday I read my update that tells me how big the baby is.

SF How big is your baby now?

HW Honeydew melon. You know, it’s so silly. Apparently, there’s a dog one too.

SF How interested are you in the relationship between us as voyeurs and you as the subject? I looked at Beauty Papers. That’s overtly sexual, about fetishising women. This is almost more like you fetishising your own pregnant body.

HW I do think there’s something in the fact that I’m still a sexual being. In old tropes you become a mother and your sexiness was stripped from you. Almost as some kind gesture of respect that we never asked for. That’s what is interesting about fashion. It’s been a way to explore the female – that’s what I do. There are also many personal secrets tucked away inside the images, where they often look overly sexual – rarely my first thought, if thought about at all. There’s an undercurrent of personal meaning. Some images in the story are overlaid with pictures from my dad’s favourite beach. That’s seaweed. Mother earthing. My dad has Benson’s disease, so he’s not able to communicate any more. But I still want to include him in my life in ways that I can. It’s sad when I think of how good he would have been as a grandfather.

SF This story is so intensely autobiographical. Do you think all of your work is?

HW It is. I graduated from art school in 2010. I loved emotive art and started as a painter, which seemed to be the most primitive and uninteresting trade at the time. There was a bit of a backlash against people like Tracey Emin – who wore their heart on their sleeve. People whose work was too autobiographical, too self-involved. I loved her diary works and felt a kinship to them but my era was having a conceptual moment that I didn’t fit in with. I will always be an artist first but fashion allowed me to continue to use emotive language more freely and the impulse has never left me. There’s a picture of me with a pushchair on fire. I wanted to express the fear of being a bad mother. That’s my neighbour’s shed. It’s like a doll’s house. The dream gone wrong. 

SF Very few artists have represented fear in pregnancy. Probably because they are mostly men, so maybe it’s not their place to look at that.

HW Yes, that was nice. They left it for us.

SF But being pregnant can be really frightening at times. 

HW Part of the story I wanted to show was my thoughts of, oh God, am I going to be a bad mother? Am I going to drop the baby? Am I not going to love the baby? Am I going to have postpartum depression? What’s amazing is that there is so much information about those things now and people talk about it all the time.

SF That anxiety goes on for ever, I think. Did working with a body double in a mask feel strange to you?

HW So strange. Every time I look in the mirror now, I see the mask. It’s terrifying. When you ordinarily look in the mirror you see what you want to see. You think you look good or you think you look terrible. It doesn’t matter what you actually look like. I asked Chaïm, who made the mask, to get all the bits and bobs in there. Go hard on the skin blemishes. I knew they were there but when you actually see them looking back at you, it’s quite grotesque. My face like a piece of meat, you really see it that way. When I show the photos to people, they can’t understand that it’s not me in those pictures.

SF Did you do it for purely practical reasons?

HW Not only. There is something very laborious about taking a self-portrait, the tripod, the focusing etc, but I also wanted to divide myself – the divided self. She was supposed to be the idealised version of me, unstretched and glossy. It’s a shame we didn’t have more time with Anna, who wore the suffocating mask along with the fake bump and wig. There was so much more fun to be had.

SF The image with the snake is referencing Avedon’s Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent [1981]? 

HW Yes. I thought that was funny. It’s my “pregnancy picture”. 

SF You know the thematic of this issue of the magazine is cliché?

HW So much of what I do is about cliché. The tropes of being a woman are so clichéd. If you want to put a signal out, it’s as simple as a little make-up and people treat you totally differently – it’s a totally different day, a different mask.

That’s a real snake crushing me in the picture. I put make-up on in that one too, to cover the pigmentation on my face, to be the idealised pregnant woman for her pregnancy shoot. 

SF And there’s an apple in another image. Eve’s apple. 

HW Yes. Purity lost. And for taking the apple we must suffer in childbirth. But I actually feel purer than ever. There’s something in the body becoming so functional, it’s before shame. The instinctiveness and the nakedness of breastfeeding, for example, feels like that moment before the apple when there was no shame attached to the naked body. There’s one really disturbing breastfeeding image, the masked me breastfeeding me, the idea of a mother still needing a mother. There’s also me breastfeeding from John. Which takes the breast even further away from the sexual, because he doesn’t have one. It’s about becoming dependent on each other in a new way as a family and recognising that we all need to be nurtured.

SF You are photographing something that is transient, and by photographing it you’re fixing it in time. I suppose that is what photography is more generally, but it feels somehow more pronounced in this context. 

HW The permanence is scary sometimes. I only thought about showing my child these images today. I thought maybe the baby never sees these. It’s very different because it’s still inside me. Baby out, different.

SF Do you think about that often, with explicit imagery?

HW I think about it all the time, but I try to be free. I don’t always get it right and people correct me. I like that conversation though.

SF Do people ever talk about your nudes, or look at your nudes, in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable? 

HW It’s hard to put yourself out there and be judged. The real private self isn’t this though. It’s still a performance, especially in a self-portrait. Looking back, I realised I was trying to seem approachable, not too attractive or too sexy. But I’m obviously aware of the camera and that annoys me. I wanted to catch myself in a real state, but because I’m the one taking the photograph, that’s almost impossible. Some pictures are ugly because I felt I should include them, so I wouldn’t seem vain, which is probably the vainest thing you can do. In one I’m standing nicely, in another I’m slumped and badly postured. Sometimes I feel I can be quite vulgar. That’s part of me, letting people see a little too much. Not necessarily deliberately. 

“So much of what I do is about cliché. The tropes of being a woman are so clichéd. If you want to put a signal out, it’s as simple as a little make-up and people treat you totally differently – it’s a totally different day, a different mask” – Harley Weir

SF And you don’t lie awake at night thinking about that.

HW Sometimes. You don’t want to read the comments too much. I don’t put much on Instagram for that reason. I would say that I have some boundaries, but the idea of vulgarity is something I subconsciously play with a lot. Or at least it seems my tolerance is higher than most. There is me covered in milk with my legs up. It reeked, because it came from France in a heatwave with Leana the make-up artist. I was trying to photograph what the baby would see coming to get the milk. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a linea nigra, the dark line that can appear when pregnant, apparently as an arrow to direct a new born to the breast.

SF There’s also the cliché of the earth mother, and that huge power, but equal to that is vulnerability.

HW Since I’ve become obviously pregnant, when I’m not with John, I don’t like walking around at nighttime. I want to be with my husband. I know most people are not thinking bad thoughts, but I feel vulnerable. There’s something of the mother earth in the photo of me feeding the fawn. This instinct to nurture, but also suggestive of how exposed motherhood can make you feel. I read that, in England, they used to use puppies to keep the milk supply going if your baby was away from you, fawns or pigs in other countries. And if your milk wasn’t working, they would bring round a donkey or a goat for the baby to suckle from. 

SF Some of your self-portrait imagery displays a complete lack of vanity.

HW Art and fashion both rank quite high in the thoughts of the self. Oddly with fashion, being the voyeur that I am, possibly the less self-absorbing of the two. It’s so much about the other. It’s rare to see the photographer. We’re like ghosts haunting the image but we are never really there. I often photograph some of the most attractive people in the world and then sit with retouching comments to make them look even more attractive. So it’s hard to think, damn I look hot here, because in my mind, by comparison, I look like a gremlin. Me looking vain as hell to the public is probably me thinking I look real and unfiltered. It’s hard to be objective when it’s me in front of the lens but I like to think I show both sides. Perfection isn’t interesting.

Styling: Georgia Pendlebury. Hair: Alex Brownsell at Streeters using KEUNE and BLEACH LONDON. Make-up: Leana Ardeleanu at Artlist using MAKE UP FOR EVER. Mask: Chaïm Vischel. Manicure: Lauren Michelle Pires using Le Vernis in Garconne and La Crème Main by CHANEL BEAUTY. Set design: Phoebe Shakespeare. Casting: Gabrielle Lawrence for People-File at MiniTitle. Model: Anna Ramfel. Talent: John Kelleher. Studio manager: Melissa Arras. Lighting director: Jordan Lee. Photographic assistants: Chiara Croserio and JJay Johnson. Styling assistants: Ethan Barbara, Michiel Heemskerk and Stoyan Chuchuranov. Hair assistant: Tommy Stayton. Make-up assistant: Gwen Ryan. Set-design assistants: Freya Purkhardt and Keelin Coyle. Production: Partner Films. Executive producer: Kimberly Arms. Producers: Star Santos Hannan and Valeria Rocca. Production assistant: Thea Levine. Special thanks to Ruben Riley Garrett

This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue, marking 25 years of AnOther Magazine, on sale internationally on 17 September 2026. Pre-order here. 

This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue of AnOther Magazine: 

Among the earliest and most famous depictions of a female nude is the Venus of Willendorf. 

There are many Venuses, a broad – and obviously retrospective – nomenclature for figurines originating from the Upper Palaeolithic period, dating back 10,000 to 40,000 years. The Venus of Willendorf is carved in oolitic limestone. Standing a mere 11.1 centimetres tall, she is reputedly 30,000 years old. She has swollen breasts and a protuberant belly, both suggestive of pregnancy. Many thousands of words have been written about her. Is she, in fact, pregnant? Is she an ancient fertility doll, designed to be held in the hand of prospective or birthing mothers? Is she not pregnant at all but a symbol of beauty as it was perceived at that time? Also conjecture: the perspective of this Venus and more than a few of her Venus sisters, the fact that she has no facial features, or indeed feet, has led some to surmise that her creator was female – she is a self-portrait. Of course, nothing is proven. The issues this little Venus’s provenance raises, though, seem pertinent now for Harley Weir, whose exploration of the female form – and just the female – including her own, has led to some of the most striking and evocative imagery of the past decade. 

In the history of art, depictions of pregnant women are few and far between. They are predominantly seen through the eyes of male artists. Their bodies are either hidden – through the medieval and Renaissance periods it was the fashion for women to wear voluminous clothing – or idealised. The Madonna is the most prevalent of all pregnant females in art history – the mother of all art historical clichés? – and her baby’s conception was immaculate. In myriad portrayals, myriad Annunciations, that purity is signified by the presence of a white dove. Of that same era, for many years critics speculated that the female figure in Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait (1434) was pregnant. Emblems of fertility – a carving of Saint Margaret of Antioch on a chair by the bed, ripe oranges, a symbol of prosperity but also fecundity, on the windowsill – are present in the painting’s background. The fullness of her famous green dress has since been attributed to the extravagance of its fabrication, however. Three-dimensional laser scans of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503–17) captured some 20 years ago now are not so easily dismissed. A fine gauze veil – or guarnello – seen over her dress, until that point hidden by aged varnish on the painting’s surface, is typical of those worn by soon-to-be or new mothers of that time. Representation of pregnant nudes in classical painting, meanwhile, are likely negative. Titian’s masterpiece Diana and Callisto (1556–59), which hangs in the National Gallery in London, is the best known. Nymph Callisto’s shaming, the revelation of her naked, pregnant body and subsequent fall from chastity, is subject to the goddess Diana’s fierce disapproval. Raped by Jupiter, Callisto was later transformed into a bear by that god’s wife, Juno. Or so the story goes.

A few centuries on, and modern artists from Gustav Klimt to Pablo Picasso and Lucian Freud painted (and sculpted) pregnant women, but always – inevitably – from a distance. Klimt’s Hope paintings, dated 1903 and 1907–08, of his favourite model Herma were executed against her better judgment, and the earlier rendition, portraying her naked surrounded by mythical monsters, caused a scandal. Picasso’s 1950 sculpture La Femme Enceinte was inspired by his partner at the time, Françoise Gilot, who had recently given birth to their second child, Paloma; he used ceramic bowls and pitchers to create the figure’s rounded breasts and stomach. Freud’s portraits of pregnant women, some carrying his own children, were forensic in their attention to detail: the subject as specimen. 

It wasn’t until the last century that female artists’ representations of pregnancy began to enter the gallery setting. Paula Modersohn-Becker’s nude self-portrait of an imaginary pregnancy in 1906, Alice Neel’s paintings of pregnant women, clothed and nude, in the Sixties and Seventies and Chantal Joffe’s pregnant self-portraits are impassioned in their bid for reclamation, showing not only pregnancy’s beauty and power but also its complexity. For the first time, there is a sense of women’s alienation from their own bodies antepartum, for their feelings of intense love alongside, and never unreasonably, fear.

Harley Weir is no stranger to the self-portrait. Her 2022 Beauty Papers monograph, dedicated to “all the dolls in the world”, is an unflinchingly visceral – at times grotesque – representation of the tropes of femininity and the preconceptions those raise. Four years on, and ten weeks pregnant, Weir began to regularly take pictures of herself naked or near-naked in the relative privacy of her bedroom. At 32 weeks a further, more studied series was taken, including portraits of Weir, now helped by John Kelleher, her husband and the father of the baby, and of a body double wearing a pregnancy belly and Harley Weir mask. With styling by her friend and longtime collaborator Georgia Pendlebury, these images serve as Weir’s visual response to her physical and emotional transition at a time that may be as challenging as it is joyful. And intimate, but: “The real private self isn’t this though,” she says. “It’s still a performance, especially in a self-portrait.”

SUSANNAH FRANKEL Do you know the Venus of Willendorf? She’s got no feet. People think a woman may have made her.

HARLEY WEIR Because she’s looking down at her body? I’ve been documenting my pregnancy from week ten and there are a lot of looking-down pictures and also looking up in the mirror. When you’re pregnant there are so many blind spots. My husband helped take many of the pictures for that reason. The series is called Death and Entrances because, from what I’ve read, it’s like an ego death. You’re giving birth but you’re also dying, you change. I felt, physically in this story, as if I was wearing a disguise. 

That’s something I think connects back to the Venus of Willendorf, this idea of a woman looking down at a body that is powerful, but also unfamiliar. During pregnancy, your body becomes the most visible thing about you, but at the same time it can feel like it no longer belongs. Here, I don’t have my usual breasts, I don’t have my usual stomach. I felt almost free from the shame of being nude because the bump isn’t me or us.

SF The physical state of pregnancy is extreme. We are taught from an early age to control our bodies and our body image. When you’re pregnant, you surrender that control. Perhaps your body is preparing you for becoming a mother, because once that happens your life is not your own in the same way.

HW Yes, it feels like that. It feels good. I’ve always been self-conscious about my breasts because they were so small. Now they are engorged and full of stretchmarks, but I don’t care who sees them. They’ve become functional objects. And there’s a safety in that. I feel much more at ease. I love being this blob that will bring purpose to someone new and it in turn gives my body purpose, a reason for its irregular shapes that before felt like deformities. 

SF Is there any fear involved?

HW There was a lot more at the beginning. But I’m still at the stage where you don’t really know what’s about to hit. I’m in the phase where I feel this is the baby, it’s this bump. But no, the baby is going to come out and rock my world. 

SF Have you looked at the way pregnant women are represented in art?

HW I haven’t seen much pregnant art – especially from the past. There’s the Virgin Mary, but we rarely see her pregnant. She didn’t even have sex. The virgin and the mother. 

SF There’s that – the Christian ideal – but also some quite violent portrayals. 

HW I have to say I can’t think of one classical painting where you see a pregnant woman. Klimt maybe. My mother talks a lot about how, even when she was younger, you had to cover the bump up, you couldn’t show it freely. I feel now we’re having a renaissance for mothers. The mother is more celebrated. I didn’t feel secure enough to be having a kid until now. And I’m getting on. I’ll be 38 when it comes out.

SF People called me a geriatric mother. I was 37.

HW But they’ve changed it now.

SF Are you not geriatric?

HW I would have been, but they stopped using that term recently, which is great. I do think this is an amazing moment for mothers. On Instagram there are so many inspirational women sharing their motherhood stories. Once you get pregnant your algorithm knows and they’re everywhere. So many cool mothers online, which I feel is something you wouldn’t have seen in the early Noughties. Mothers were dismissed or hidden. There was the fear of overpopulation and that having children was bad for the environment,
I used to hear that a lot. Now in the west fewer people are having babies, pregnancy is a positive thing again. It goes in cycles, I suppose. I’ve just finished reading Born [The Untold History of Humanity by Lucy Inglis]. It’s fascinating how attitudes shift. During the Roman Empire, people would kill unwanted babies, by “exposure” – especially girls. 

SF In China and Japan they are now rolling out financial incentives to persuade people to have babies. 

HW Exactly. First China wasn’t allowing more than one baby. Now there aren’t enough. For now, it feels like we’re in a baby-positive cycle.

SF The death part of the equation is the old you saying goodbye to your old life.

HW And saying hello to the mystery of what is about to begin. I have already said goodbye to my old body. It’s all very physical now. The changes being made are visual, my insides are yet to be rebirthed.

SF You’ve photographed yourself before. How much of that process is about showing yourself to the world and how much is it about introspection, working out what, in this case, your pregnancy means for you?

“I have already said goodbye to my old body. It’s all very physical now. The changes being made are visual, my insides are yet to be rebirthed” – Harley Weir

HW My life is already very bump-forward. Wherever I go, it’s the focal point of conversation. It’s hard not to be obsessed by the pregnancy. At one point people argued that because the baby takes so much nutrition, the mother’s brain shrinks by 20 per cent. Now they are calling it rewiring. I’m rewiring. And my way of coping with things is photography – it’s like therapy. It’s a way for me to work out those ideas and also to detach from them. I was thinking how I’m kissing goodbye to this flat-chested girl and becoming a woman. The pregnancy at this stage is visual, the changes are reflected in the mirror. Every Wednesday I read my update that tells me how big the baby is.

SF How big is your baby now?

HW Honeydew melon. You know, it’s so silly. Apparently, there’s a dog one too.

SF How interested are you in the relationship between us as voyeurs and you as the subject? I looked at Beauty Papers. That’s overtly sexual, about fetishising women. This is almost more like you fetishising your own pregnant body.

HW I do think there’s something in the fact that I’m still a sexual being. In old tropes you become a mother and your sexiness was stripped from you. Almost as some kind gesture of respect that we never asked for. That’s what is interesting about fashion. It’s been a way to explore the female – that’s what I do. There are also many personal secrets tucked away inside the images, where they often look overly sexual – rarely my first thought, if thought about at all. There’s an undercurrent of personal meaning. Some images in the story are overlaid with pictures from my dad’s favourite beach. That’s seaweed. Mother earthing. My dad has Benson’s disease, so he’s not able to communicate any more. But I still want to include him in my life in ways that I can. It’s sad when I think of how good he would have been as a grandfather.

SF This story is so intensely autobiographical. Do you think all of your work is?

HW It is. I graduated from art school in 2010. I loved emotive art and started as a painter, which seemed to be the most primitive and uninteresting trade at the time. There was a bit of a backlash against people like Tracey Emin – who wore their heart on their sleeve. People whose work was too autobiographical, too self-involved. I loved her diary works and felt a kinship to them but my era was having a conceptual moment that I didn’t fit in with. I will always be an artist first but fashion allowed me to continue to use emotive language more freely and the impulse has never left me. There’s a picture of me with a pushchair on fire. I wanted to express the fear of being a bad mother. That’s my neighbour’s shed. It’s like a doll’s house. The dream gone wrong. 

SF Very few artists have represented fear in pregnancy. Probably because they are mostly men, so maybe it’s not their place to look at that.

HW Yes, that was nice. They left it for us.

SF But being pregnant can be really frightening at times. 

HW Part of the story I wanted to show was my thoughts of, oh God, am I going to be a bad mother? Am I going to drop the baby? Am I not going to love the baby? Am I going to have postpartum depression? What’s amazing is that there is so much information about those things now and people talk about it all the time.

SF That anxiety goes on for ever, I think. Did working with a body double in a mask feel strange to you?

HW So strange. Every time I look in the mirror now, I see the mask. It’s terrifying. When you ordinarily look in the mirror you see what you want to see. You think you look good or you think you look terrible. It doesn’t matter what you actually look like. I asked Chaïm, who made the mask, to get all the bits and bobs in there. Go hard on the skin blemishes. I knew they were there but when you actually see them looking back at you, it’s quite grotesque. My face like a piece of meat, you really see it that way. When I show the photos to people, they can’t understand that it’s not me in those pictures.

SF Did you do it for purely practical reasons?

HW Not only. There is something very laborious about taking a self-portrait, the tripod, the focusing etc, but I also wanted to divide myself – the divided self. She was supposed to be the idealised version of me, unstretched and glossy. It’s a shame we didn’t have more time with Anna, who wore the suffocating mask along with the fake bump and wig. There was so much more fun to be had.

SF The image with the snake is referencing Avedon’s Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent [1981]? 

HW Yes. I thought that was funny. It’s my “pregnancy picture”. 

SF You know the thematic of this issue of the magazine is cliché?

HW So much of what I do is about cliché. The tropes of being a woman are so clichéd. If you want to put a signal out, it’s as simple as a little make-up and people treat you totally differently – it’s a totally different day, a different mask.

That’s a real snake crushing me in the picture. I put make-up on in that one too, to cover the pigmentation on my face, to be the idealised pregnant woman for her pregnancy shoot. 

SF And there’s an apple in another image. Eve’s apple. 

HW Yes. Purity lost. And for taking the apple we must suffer in childbirth. But I actually feel purer than ever. There’s something in the body becoming so functional, it’s before shame. The instinctiveness and the nakedness of breastfeeding, for example, feels like that moment before the apple when there was no shame attached to the naked body. There’s one really disturbing breastfeeding image, the masked me breastfeeding me, the idea of a mother still needing a mother. There’s also me breastfeeding from John. Which takes the breast even further away from the sexual, because he doesn’t have one. It’s about becoming dependent on each other in a new way as a family and recognising that we all need to be nurtured.

SF You are photographing something that is transient, and by photographing it you’re fixing it in time. I suppose that is what photography is more generally, but it feels somehow more pronounced in this context. 

HW The permanence is scary sometimes. I only thought about showing my child these images today. I thought maybe the baby never sees these. It’s very different because it’s still inside me. Baby out, different.

SF Do you think about that often, with explicit imagery?

HW I think about it all the time, but I try to be free. I don’t always get it right and people correct me. I like that conversation though.

SF Do people ever talk about your nudes, or look at your nudes, in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable? 

HW It’s hard to put yourself out there and be judged. The real private self isn’t this though. It’s still a performance, especially in a self-portrait. Looking back, I realised I was trying to seem approachable, not too attractive or too sexy. But I’m obviously aware of the camera and that annoys me. I wanted to catch myself in a real state, but because I’m the one taking the photograph, that’s almost impossible. Some pictures are ugly because I felt I should include them, so I wouldn’t seem vain, which is probably the vainest thing you can do. In one I’m standing nicely, in another I’m slumped and badly postured. Sometimes I feel I can be quite vulgar. That’s part of me, letting people see a little too much. Not necessarily deliberately. 

“So much of what I do is about cliché. The tropes of being a woman are so clichéd. If you want to put a signal out, it’s as simple as a little make-up and people treat you totally differently – it’s a totally different day, a different mask” – Harley Weir

SF And you don’t lie awake at night thinking about that.

HW Sometimes. You don’t want to read the comments too much. I don’t put much on Instagram for that reason. I would say that I have some boundaries, but the idea of vulgarity is something I subconsciously play with a lot. Or at least it seems my tolerance is higher than most. There is me covered in milk with my legs up. It reeked, because it came from France in a heatwave with Leana the make-up artist. I was trying to photograph what the baby would see coming to get the milk. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a linea nigra, the dark line that can appear when pregnant, apparently as an arrow to direct a new born to the breast.

SF There’s also the cliché of the earth mother, and that huge power, but equal to that is vulnerability.

HW Since I’ve become obviously pregnant, when I’m not with John, I don’t like walking around at nighttime. I want to be with my husband. I know most people are not thinking bad thoughts, but I feel vulnerable. There’s something of the mother earth in the photo of me feeding the fawn. This instinct to nurture, but also suggestive of how exposed motherhood can make you feel. I read that, in England, they used to use puppies to keep the milk supply going if your baby was away from you, fawns or pigs in other countries. And if your milk wasn’t working, they would bring round a donkey or a goat for the baby to suckle from. 

SF Some of your self-portrait imagery displays a complete lack of vanity.

HW Art and fashion both rank quite high in the thoughts of the self. Oddly with fashion, being the voyeur that I am, possibly the less self-absorbing of the two. It’s so much about the other. It’s rare to see the photographer. We’re like ghosts haunting the image but we are never really there. I often photograph some of the most attractive people in the world and then sit with retouching comments to make them look even more attractive. So it’s hard to think, damn I look hot here, because in my mind, by comparison, I look like a gremlin. Me looking vain as hell to the public is probably me thinking I look real and unfiltered. It’s hard to be objective when it’s me in front of the lens but I like to think I show both sides. Perfection isn’t interesting.

Styling: Georgia Pendlebury. Hair: Alex Brownsell at Streeters using KEUNE and BLEACH LONDON. Make-up: Leana Ardeleanu at Artlist using MAKE UP FOR EVER. Mask: Chaïm Vischel. Manicure: Lauren Michelle Pires using Le Vernis in Garconne and La Crème Main by CHANEL BEAUTY. Set design: Phoebe Shakespeare. Casting: Gabrielle Lawrence for People-File at MiniTitle. Model: Anna Ramfel. Talent: John Kelleher. Studio manager: Melissa Arras. Lighting director: Jordan Lee. Photographic assistants: Chiara Croserio and JJay Johnson. Styling assistants: Ethan Barbara, Michiel Heemskerk and Stoyan Chuchuranov. Hair assistant: Tommy Stayton. Make-up assistant: Gwen Ryan. Set-design assistants: Freya Purkhardt and Keelin Coyle. Production: Partner Films. Executive producer: Kimberly Arms. Producers: Star Santos Hannan and Valeria Rocca. Production assistant: Thea Levine. Special thanks to Ruben Riley Garrett

This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2026 issue, marking 25 years of AnOther Magazine, on sale internationally on 17 September 2026. Pre-order here.