A woman with a bull costume exuding masculine energy: Marisol Mendez’s best photograph

‘This is part of my series Mother. I would ask my subjects: Do you feel more like a Mary Magdalene or a Virgin Mary? It’s always a fun question to ask’ Paul McCartney famously says that he got the melody for Yesterday in a dream. I used to think that was artistic licence, but then it happened to me with this image. I had a dream about a half woman-half animal, standing alone in the middle of a field, with trees surrounding her. I was working on a series of images, called Madre, about the depiction of womanhood. The media in Bolivia always present women in a traditionally feminine way. It is rare to see a woman who displays more masculine attributes and her not be immediately labelled as a lesbian – there is no nuance. When I was 14, I dressed exclusively in men’s clothes for about a year, which had more to do with my insecurities than my gender. I never liked clothes that hug your body, like skinny jeans. My mum didn’t wonder about my gender identity, she just understood it was part of my self-expression. My therapist used to say that I have masculine traits: I am ambitious, competitive; I welcome the masculine in me. So for this image, made in 2019, I wanted to show a