“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” This quote by John Berger from “Ways of Seeing” describes a hierarchy of the gaze that continues to resonate today. While the male gaze upon female beauty is culturally omnipresent, there is a lack of images and narratives in which men are viewed from a female perspective. With her photo and video work “Adonis”, Johanna Maria Dietz approaches this absence with a curious and questioning gaze. The portraits place men in the role of the observed and reflect ideals of beauty as well as social attributions of masculinity.

The photographs are complemented by video interviews with women of different ages who speak about their desire: about what they find desirable in men, how they perceive themselves within this desire between activity and passivity, and how their relationship to it has changed over time. Together, these approaches make clear that the female gaze resists fixed attributions and appears as an open process of searching. A mere reversal of male ways of looking would fail to recognise its complexity and would not do justice to the multilayered nature of female perspectives. The relationship between gaze and desire, too, does not follow a simple binary logic, but is tied to concepts of gender that are currently becoming more plural and being redefined.

2025