‘A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.’ 
— John Berger

‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’ 
— Audre Lorde 

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It’s been a decade since Simon Fujiwara turned the camera on his former art teacher, Joanne Salley. His sly, incisive 13-minute piece, exploring female image, persona, and vulnerability in the age of social media, has only proven more uncomfortably poignant in those intervening years. In his film Joanne, made five years after a public scandal forced Miss. Salley to leave her role at Harrow School for Boys, the former beauty queen and model talks about her experiences, and about trying to rebrand herself online. The scandal - wherein private topless photos were circulated without her knowledge or consent around the school - was a bruising experience. Ostensibly, Joanne is trying to rewrite the public narrative about her identity in the aftermath. She, as she says, is also an artist, a boxer, a charity worker, a television presenter. But no one seems to care as much about that as they do about her topless photos. 

A PR person informs her that she should use the media’s own means to change the narrative; to make herself a new product celebrating her real selfhood. This is what Joanne sets out to do. Fujiwara shows her talking to a brand manager, essentially stage-rehearsing a faux-candid conversation before going on camera: ‘It’s not about how you look, it’s about what you do,’ she repeats to him, like a mantra. The world - and the impetus for this rebrand - tend to say otherwise. 

In 2011, a USB stick of Salley’s semi-nude photos was circulated around the prodigious school where she taught. The former Miss Northern Ireland became a lightning rod for cruel tabloid taunts nicknaming her ‘the topless teacher’. It was familiar, textbook misogyny: crass fetishisation on one hand and shaming on the other. Hot teacher caught looking too hot. As a result, she lost her career and a long-term relationship. (Fujiwara’s shots of Joanne literally being pelted by handfuls of mud are not far off the mark.) As a woman whose beauty had been the focus of her early career - and who had spent much of her life being photographed - it was understandable that when Joanne Salley wanted to tell her own story she would reach for the tools that had brought her this far: the camera. 

This isn’t to say that Salley isn’t legitimately talking through her feelings on camera, or that she isn’t heartbroken by what has happened to her. But Joanne presents a question that has nothing to do with the validity or honesty of her emotion. It’s about why she should feel she has to do this to begin with, and this is what Fujiwara’s work emphasises. He films her in the ironic glare of commercial photoshoot lighting, posing gleefully as a model; he layers over the screen a host of moving images from her social media profile, of her running, painting, talking and even crying to camera. This overload of sound and vision - both constructed and from a place of apparent authenticity - has a wilfully bombastic, PR-clean quality about it. It is aestheticised and sleek-haired, full of sunlit rooms, avocado toast, and pumping pop music. It is afraid of the dark; downplays the sexuality that this woman always had the right to express. 

Fujiwara’s piece is wary and pointed in its critique - not of Joanne, but of the way she seems forced to position herself. There are simply different costumes for women that are required to market or apologise for ourselves, but we all ultimately end up selling something. Since 2016, when Joanne was made, the malign underpinnings of social media -  and the male tech autocrats who run them with nefarious aims - have only become clearer. And have only made these questions murkier. 

Joanne preempts IG and TikTok trends towards vulnerability and ‘authenticity’. In recent years, there’s been a move away from retouched influencer aesthetics and toward messy self-disclosure, or blurry, artfully artless photo dumps. But no matter how DIY the new aesthetic, or raw the caption, the seams are always there. In the very act of sculpting a persona - of posting fragments of ourselves online - we are always manufacturing something. 

The internet is a hydra-like series of mutations, insisting both on AI-driven perfection and on the idea that women - women most of all - should offer messy mental health talk alongside our selfies. Because: feminism, right? We have agreed as a culture that it’s unhealthy for young women and girls to have physically perfect, surgically-augmented avatars thrown into their faces at warp speed, without context. So we offer imperfection, too. And sure: a host of women online who are willing to air taboo, unsexy, or difficult personal information does provide catharsis and solidarity in many cases. 

But Joanne begs the question: is all this preening vulnerability that much of an improvement?

One wonders if it’s not merely an exercise in asking women to pull out their guts and examine them on a public stage. Women like Joanne Salley - and many less famous women - still feel this type of subconscious pressure. It is an urge to distill, explain, and publicise the darkest bits of our humanity to prove we are what should be self-evident: complex, and human. 

In 2026, the chic version of the stripped-back Instagram persona looks different than it did a decade ago. Less pilates, no hashtags. But anyone who’s old enough to remember the earlier days of the internet knows the score. In our desire to unpick the social media edifice we once pledged fealty to, we try to de-gloss the images we once carefully made glossy. Women are dissolving their filler injections and ugly-crying to the iPhone screen, talking about the horror of revenge porn and joking about gleeful misandry. In some ways, it’s a step forward. For myself - a millennial addicted to scrolling Instagram - I often take heart in listening to women talk or post about their experiences with mental health struggles, injectables, or their hormonal cycles. I am far from immune to wanting to receive comfort from shared imperfection. But it also makes me wonder if we’ve circled back to the same place: a kind of sunk-cost fallacy where to be an attractive, public-facing woman online is to keep rebranding with the discourse of our moment. It just so happens that this currently includes being imperfect. The pressure is now to be attractive in the correct way; to be photographed with the right low-fi camera; to discuss your mental health with the right words. To be hot and high-achieving and relatable online is to know that you must continue playing the game, no matter the losses. 

Early in the film, Joanne lists various adjectives to describe herself: model, teacher, artist. And then she says something which seems very honest. It’s the way any woman might feel if she had nude photos circulated without her consent and lost a job over it. The way any of us might feel trying to grin to camera and justify our existence, to everyone and no-one. Joanne says: ‘I feel like I’m nothing. Even though I’m all of that.’ 

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Christina Newland is a London-based award winning writer, broadcaster, and journalist on film and culture. She was the former Lead Film Critic at the i Newspaper and a contributing editor to Empire Magazine. Her previous writing has appeared in publications such as Sight & Sound Magazine, BBC Culture, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone UK, SSENSE, Mr. Porter, Criterion, Dazed, GQ, EMPIRE, BBC, The Guardian, VICE, Hazlitt, Baffler Mag, The Ringer, and more.