Both Sides of the Camera: From Getaway to Women United Art Magazine

Twenty-one years separate Robyn Daly’s latest magazine cover from the last time she appeared on one as both photographer and model.

This time she has been selected as the cover artist for Issue XIV of Women United Art Magazine, with Inside Is A Woman appearing on the front cover and Portrait In Yellow on the back cover. The issue also includes a four-page feature and interview with Daly.

The cover selection came as an unexpected addition to the original invitation to be featured in the magazine, making the issue particularly significant.

It also creates an unlikely connection between her current fine-art practice and a much earlier period in her photographic career.

From photojournalist to artist

Before turning to fine-art photography in 2025, Robyn Daly spent ten years as a photojournalist at South African travel publication Getaway magazine, photographing people, places and wildlife across Africa. She later worked in commercial photography before putting the camera aside for several years.

During her Getaway years, appearing in her own photographs was less an artistic decision than a practical one. Working on location in some pretty wild parts of Africa, models were not readily available when a human figure was needed in a picture. The solution was often simple: set the self-timer, get into position and become both photographer and subject.

Several of those photographs found their way onto the magazine’s covers, including her last appearance as both photographer and model in 2005 poolside at Madikwe Private Game Reserve.

Two of the Getaway magazine covers that were posed for and taken by Robyn Daly.

Twenty-one years later, she has returned to the other side of her own camera, but with a very different intent.

In her interview with Women United Art Magazine, Daly describes how her early career was shaped by the requirements of editorial and commercial photography. Although she already felt there was more to photography than producing a sharp still likeness, there was little opportunity within those environments for artistic experimentation. When she returned to photography in 2025, she did so with a determination to photograph on her own terms.

Inside Is A Woman

That shift is particularly evident in Inside Is A Woman.

Today Daly works performatively, spending, as she puts it in the interview, “more time in front of the camera than behind it”, bringing the moving female body into relation with light, time and the spaces she inhabits.

The superficial similarity, however, disguises a fundamental difference. In Daly’s current work, placing herself before the camera is an artistic decision, integral to a practice concerned with female subjecthood and embodied experience.

Inside Is A Woman is part of that developing visual language. Rather than presenting the body as a fixed and readily described object, the work allows it to shift, merge and extend through movement. Daly’s wider practice positions the female form as active and self-determining, rather than as an object of observation.

Speaking in the magazine about what she ultimately wants the work to communicate, Daly describes photography as a memento vivere: a means of expressing what it is to be alive. Her ambition, she says, is to make visible the lived experience of inhabiting a body and to resist the fixed images to which women have historically been reduced.

The appearance of Inside Is A Woman on the cover of Women United Art Magazine therefore brings two very different periods of Daly’s life in photography into an unexpected proximity: the photojournalist who occasionally stepped into her own photographs through necessity, and the emerging artist for whom placing herself before the camera is a deliberate means of articulating embodied female experience.

Women United Art Magazine is published by the Women United Art Movement. Issue XIV was edited by Mona Lerch, and features Inside Is A Woman, Portrait In Yellow and a selection of Daly’s recent photographic work. Available on all the Amazon marketplaces.