“The only breasts that we’re comfortable with seeing are breasts that are young and sexualised.”

When Facebook censored images of a breast-feeding infant and a topless grandmother, but failed to censor equally explicit images of a wet t-shirt contest, Sexpo girls and other traditionally sexy images of women from Gemma-Rose Turnbull’s Facebook picture section, it blew up a gust of indignation and cries of sexism from around the world.

According to photojournalist Gemma-Rose Turnbull a lot of what we believe about beauty today is created by the media. Beauty is often defined by airbrushed models in magazines and commercials where women seem to age backwards. The criteria for women to be beautiful is extremely narrow by the media’s standards, and women who don’t fit into it often end up insecure with their bodies and who they are.

Turnbull challenges these standards through her very real and confronting series, Show Us Ya Tits. She has been working on this project for about five years now, and has always been fascinated by gender, particularly how women perceive their own bodies. Through her photographs of different women’s breasts, Turnbull questions our perception of beauty and shows how much power the media has to shape the way we think.

Photojournalist Gemma-Rose Turnbull graduated with First Class Honours in Documentary Photography from the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, in 2005.

Text and multimedia by Kannagi Bhatt for the Argus, Interview by Rebecca Taylor