A woman with a bull costume exuding masculine energy: Marisol Mendez's best photograph

"I had a dream about a half woman-half animal, standing alone in the middle of a field, with trees surrounding her. I was working on a series of images, called Madre, about the depiction of womanhood. The media in Bolivia always present women in a traditionally feminine way. It is rare to see a woman who displays more masculine attributes and her not be immediately labelled as a lesbian there is no nuance."

"When I was 14, I dressed exclusively in men's clothes for about a year, which had more to do with my insecurities than my gender. I never liked clothes that hug your body, like skinny jeans. My mum didn't wonder about my gender identity, she just understood it was part of my self-expression. My therapist used to say that I have masculine traits: I am ambitious, competitive; I welcome the masculine in me."

"Being naked is being oneself. It can just be the comfort of being in your own skin So for this image, made in 2019, I wanted to show a woman who is comfortable in her masculine energy. The bull that the woman is holding is part of a costume worn by dancers of the waka tokori, a Bolivian dance."

"These national dances are inspired by colonial times and this one imitates Bolivian bullfighting, which is different from the Spanish the men only taunt the bull [rather than kill it]. The bullfighter, and the bull itself, are symbols of masculinity. I wanted to have this nakedness in my portraiture, because I love women's bodies. Nudity is always sexualised in Bolivia and the first time I saw the nudes in images by the US photographer Ryan McGinley, where the bodies didn't feel sexual, it seemed so rebellious to me."

A dream about a half woman-half animal standing alone in a field led to a 2019 image created for a series about depictions of womanhood. In Bolivia, women are often shown in traditionally feminine ways, with little nuance for women displaying masculine traits. Personal history includes dressing in men’s clothes at age 14 as a form of self-expression tied to insecurity rather than gender. A therapist described masculine traits such as ambition and competitiveness, and the creator links nudity with comfort and self-acceptance rather than sexuality. The portrait features a bull from the waka tokori dance, inspired by colonial-era bullfighting where men taunt rather than kill the bull, using bullfighter and bull as masculinity symbols.

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