Hanna Moon’s A Nice Magazine returns

Moon has just launched the third issue of A Nice Magazine, bringing together 18 women artists to respond to the theme ‘Me Myself and I’. Looking at these works – all varied in subject, style and process – we can see what Moon means: the ‘female gaze’ is oversimplifying. Containing images that talk about friendship, motherhood, and sex work, and some that are simply beautiful photographs, together these artists evoke the myriad ways in which women are depicting not just others, but their inner psychological landscapes. 

Moon, who has shot for 1 Granary in the past, first launched A Nice Magazine in 2014 as part of her final project at Central Saint Martins. The name was a satire of the abundance of “nice” magazines that already existed.  “I was questioning what was going on in fashion and magazine culture,” she says. Moon invited peers to contribute and cast CSM students as models. This caught the attention of editors and landed her some of her first jobs in fashion. Her photos have since been published by Vogue, Dazed and i-D, as well as for brands like Gucci and Supreme.

In 2016, Moon released the second issue of A Nice Magazine. We spoke to her about that issue, too, which you can read here. This issue was about challenging “what art actually is”, featuring Tyrone Lebon, Colin Dodgson, Fumiko Imano, and more. It has been eight years since she last published an issue, and this latest edition has been in the works for about six of those. The idea spawned in 2019 when Moon visited Dorothea Tanning’s retrospective at Tate Modern. She was struck by one self-portrait. Tanning depicted herself small in the frame, looking out over a vast landscape wearing just a pair of underwear, with her hair in two buns.

“It didn’t just raise questions for me,” Moon says. “It gave me the motivation to talk about the social and physical status of being a woman.” Like many women artists in the early 20th century, Tanning worked in the shadow of a man – her husband, Max Ernst. The show delved into her struggles as a female artist. “I sympathised with that feeling of being a bit lost or overwhelmed, but at the same time, she hadn’t lost her humour – you could see it in her styling, in her hair. That kind of resilience really moved me.”

This triggered the idea to create an issue of self-portraits under the theme ‘Me Myself and I’. “This could be any kind of self-reflection,” she says. “I believe any work reflects the artist in some way. Even if you’re photographing someone else, you’re still projecting yourself onto the image.” 

The response is varied. It includes excerpts from Momo Okabe’s Bible, a raw and intimate record of the artist’s life and Japan’s LGBTQ community. Another striking work is Cammie Toloui’s 5 Dollars for 3 Minutes. Working at a peep show, the photographer turned her camera on her customers as they revealed themselves to her. These radical images are accompanied by an illuminating interview with Moon’s long-time collaborator Moffy Gathorne Hardy: “We are so used to seeing women as the object of the male gaze,” Toloui says. “When I turned my camera on the men in the Private Pleasures booth, I violated an unspoken rule of the patriarchy – that the male is the owner of the gaze, never the object of it.”

Elsewhere, Joyce Ng presents a sweet collaboration with a toddler. As a viewer, we assume the child must be her own, but an accompanying essay reveals that they are not. This, alongside an honest text on Ng’s conflicted feelings toward motherhood challenges our assumptions about femininity, care, and the expectations placed on women. 

In another illuminating essay, Shonagh Marshall digs into the idea of the gendered gaze. She uses examples like Corinne Day’s topless photos of Kate Moss and the female director of Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines video that rocketed Emily Ratajkowski to fame. “An image of a woman taken by a woman doesn’t necessarily mean objectification has not occurred,” she states. 

As Dorothea Tanning said herself: “Women artists. There is no such thing – or person. It’s just as much a contradiction in terms as ‘man artist’ or ‘elephant artist.’” Being a woman is not a singular experience, nor does it produce a singular perspective. The idea of the female gaze is too often reduced to an aesthetic or subject matter. In reality, it’s fluid, shifting, and shaped by individual experiences.

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