A New Book Reframes Female Power Through the Lens
Photographer Brianna Capozzi has built a career around images where women aren’t objects of desire so much as architects of it. Her new monograph, Womanizer, published by Rizzoli, collects that vision into a single volume – a body of work where women hold authority over their own image, their own pleasure, and the entire frame around them.
The title alone does a lot of work.
Womanizer arrives as fashion photography continues to wrestle with how it depicts femininity – who controls the gaze, who benefits from it, and whether the industry’s long-standing aesthetic habits have genuinely shifted or simply rebranded. Capozzi’s answer, at least within the pages of this book, is visual rather than rhetorical: the women she photographs are not waiting for permission to occupy space.
What Rizzoli’s Edition Brings to the Table
Rizzoli has long served as the publisher of record for fashion photography that wants to be taken seriously as art – its monographs carry weight in both bookshop culture sections and studio bookshelves. Choosing Rizzoli for Womanizer places Capozzi’s work in direct conversation with that lineage, and the physical format of a monograph allows the photographs to exist outside the editorial context in which many of them were originally commissioned. Freed from magazine layouts, page counts, and the surrounding noise of advertising, the images read differently – slower, more deliberate, and considerably more charged.
The book’s organizing logic centers on a consistent emotional register: women in control, and visibly enjoying it. That combination – authority paired with pleasure rather than severity – is less common in fashion photography than it might seem. Strength in female-forward imagery often gets coded as stoic, untouchable, or confrontational. Capozzi’s work resists that framing. The subjects aren’t performing toughness. They’re having a genuinely good time, which turns out to be its own kind of power.
Capozzi shoots with an intimacy that suggests access rather than intrusion. Whether the images were made in controlled studio conditions or looser, more spontaneous environments, they carry the quality of women photographed by someone they actually trust – a dynamic that doesn’t happen automatically and can’t be faked in post-production.
The Specific Politics of the Word “Womanizer”
Taking a word with an almost exclusively male history and assigning it to a book entirely about women is a deliberate provocation. A “womanizer” in conventional usage describes a man who pursues women serially and without genuine commitment – the word carries centuries of normalized bad behavior dressed up as masculine charisma. Capozzi’s title doesn’t simply reclaim that word; it dismantles the assumption built into it, which is that women exist in that story as passive recipients of someone else’s attention.
In Womanizer, women are the ones doing the pursuing – of their own image, their own agency, their own sense of what looks good and feels right. The title reframes who gets to be the subject of desire and who gets to act on it. That’s not a subtle distinction. In a visual culture that has spent the better part of a century organizing itself around the opposite premise, it registers as a clear counter-argument made entirely through photographs.
Fashion photography has a particular stake in these questions because the industry is built on the idea of aspiration – and aspiration requires someone doing the looking and someone being looked at. Capozzi’s work complicates that arrangement without abandoning beauty or desirability as values. The women in her photographs are still, in many cases, conventionally glamorous. The difference is that the glamour belongs to them rather than being on loan from the frame.
Why This Book Lands Now
The publication of Womanizer by Rizzoli marks a specific moment in Capozzi’s career – the point at which a body of photographic work becomes an argument. Individual images circulate on their own terms, detached from authorship and context. A monograph insists on the whole. It asks the viewer to sit with an accumulated vision rather than a single striking frame, and it invites the question of what that vision adds up to across years of work. For Capozzi, the answer – women unassailably in control, and having a genuinely good time – turns out to be more consistent and more considered than any single photograph could suggest on its own. Whether the fashion world receives it as documentation of where things already stand, or as a statement about where they still need to go, is a question the book doesn’t bother to answer for you.
