At 18 years old, Ashley Armitage couldn't wait to start college in Santa Barbara, California. Ever since her dad bought her a Canon AE-1 film camera and a few rolls of black-and-white film three years prior, she was rarely without it. "He and I started going on photo outings," she tells Glamour. "We'd drive to different towns around Seattle, where I grew up, and start taking photos of each other or street art." It was then she knew exactly what she wanted to do with the rest of her life: be a photographer and director.
She was already attending a small arts-focused high school where she had a supportive film teacher, a documentarian who often encouraged her to submit work to film festivals. Santa Barbara's film production program was going to be the big leagues. Like her high school, it was highly competitive and hands-on, with only 300 students total pursuing a film degree. Then she arrived to find that of those 300 aspiring filmmakers, only 15 were women—a paltry 5% of the class.
Immediately she felt the effects of being one of the few women in the room. "For class projects, it was always men being chosen as the directors, producers, and DPs," she says. "The women were always the stylists, makeup artists, or assistants. Women never really held the power in the films that were being produced at the school. I couldn't deal with it."
Despite the frustration and pressure that came with constantly fighting for a seat in the director's chair—or even just at the table where the big creative calls were being made—Armitage did everything she could to get the experiences her male peers were being handed. "I started interning for the film office, where I had access to all this equipment," she says. "I was like, 'I could just do it by myself. I could just make my own film.'"
She set out to make a film with as much of a female point of view as possible, and yet she hit road blocks at each turn. "I still had to hire a male screenwriter, a male DP, and a male editor, because that's all I had access to. I'd only lived Santa Barbara for a few months and didn't have many friends outside the program." It ended up being "a terrible experience" because the guys helping her ended up overriding her decisions. "I felt super silenced," she says.
She quit the program after a year.
Fueled even more by her refusal to have the female gaze go ignored, Armitage set her sights on photography. Finally she had the creative control she'd lacked for so long. She began shooting her friends and sister at the pool, in their bathrooms, and hanging out at home together, her focus primarily being on the sisterhood they had with one another and on capturing a realistic portrait of what it was like to be a 19-year-old girl.
Eventually she found a medium to amplify her work past the small community in her hometown: Instagram.
"When I first started photography, it was super personal," Armitage says. "It was literally me taking photos of my friends, and I wouldn't post them to the internet. I didn't know, really, what was happening or that it was even important work at the time, because it was literally just a personal project. I made an Instagram in 2014 and started posting my work. I had only a couple hundred followers at first. Then it started. The audience began growing, surprisingly to me at the time, because I had no idea people cared."
In 2015 she posted a photo of her friend at the beach. They were wearing underwear with a period stain on it and their pubic hair was showing. The rest, as they say, was history. "It started exploding on the internet," Armitage recalls. "It started out positive because it was just my inner circle of friends. Like, 'Yeah, that's awesome. That's real! Who the heck has the money to throw out their underwear every time they get a blood stain?' Then this huge wave of internet trolls and negativity started coming in. It was all super, super terrible. One comment literally said, 'Shave your slob box.' Another said, 'No man is ever going to want you.'"
Once again a fire was lit inside Armitage. "All these comments really told me that a woman's body only has to do with how she fits into a male gaze," she says. "It was mainly men talking about how they felt and whether or not the photo was sexy to a man." Armitage can't say she was too surprised. To be fair, she and her friends lived in their "own little paradise" in Seattle—where neither she nor her friends shaved. In the media the only images being shown at the time were one-dimensional portrayals of beauty, and magazines were still running cover lines like "How to Get the Perfect Beach Bod."
"It reminded me how backward the world actually is," she says, and it made her remember why she'd started capturing those kinds of images in the first place. “I went into photography thinking, I want to bring in a new voice. I want to show different body types, different genders, different skin tones, and things that society would say are imperfect, like fat rolls, pimples, or stretch marks." Her next goal, then, became increasingly clear: "I thought, I'm going to have to continue doing this work, because we have to normalize this, apparently."
And normalize it she has. Over the past four years she's landed a number of high-profile campaigns. She's shot for Gucci, Nordstrom, and Lazy Oaf. But perhaps her most recognizable work is for millennial razor brand Billie. She directed a historic commercial for the brand in 2018, in which her 30-second ad was the first ever to show women actually removing body hair. Naturally she followed that up this summer with the first shaving ad to feature pubic hair. Facebook censored the ad by deeming it "adult content."
"I think the response [to the Billie campaigns] has been so powerful because women are taught to be controlled and not take up space," she says. "We're supposed to fit into this very narrow mold of what being a female is and what it means to be feminine. When we leave that tiny, tiny mold, we're seen as out of control."
Things have actually changed, though, since she left Santa Barbara more than half a decade ago. "I'm seeing more and more women in historically male roles, but we still do have a problem with the more technical and leadership roles being male-dominated," says Armitage. "The directors, the producers, the DPs, and then anything technical, so camera- and light-related, are usually male. Literally in all of the film sets I've ever been on, I've only had two female light technicians. Whenever I find them, I'm like, 'Oh, my gosh. I'm going to bring her on for everything now.'"
Until then, Armitage is happy carrying on with providing a refreshing antidote to all the facetuned and photoshopped images on the internet.
"I don't want to say, 'I'm going to change the world,' because I'm totally not," Armitage says, "but I hope to help throw a little bit more imagery into the world. My dream is that somebody—maybe in the middle of the country, who is in a conservative town of 200 people—sees my photo and is touched by it. She'll know there's an alternative to what she's always seen."
Lindsay Schallon is the senior beauty editor at Glamour. Follow her on Instagram @lindsayschallon.
This year has made one thing clear: Women are showing up, stepping up, and taking what they deserve. From politics to pop culture, women aren't just leveling the playing field—they're owning it. As we ramp up to our annual Women of the Year Summit, we will be highlighting women across industries who do the work every day. Whether it's the CEO of a multinational retail corporation, a James Beard Award–winning chef, or the World Cup champions, here are the women you need to know right now. We've already celebrated the women in sports. Up now: 12 women who are making their mark in the world of beauty, where entrepreneurs, artists, influencers, and legislators are fighting to make the beauty industry—and our culture at large—a more inclusive, truly beautiful place.
See all of the Glamour Women of the Year All Year: Beauty.
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