Healing your self image

What if the camera could change the way you see yourself?

For many people, being photographed feels like exposure, something to endure, have to do, not something to seek. 

For some a photography session is a way to break down the barriers that stop us seeing ourselves as we truly are, beautiful. 

Because what happens inside a session can go much deeper than a photograph.

Most of us have learned to hide from cameras.

It probably started young, a photo where someone said you looked tired, or big, or awkward. A tagged image you wished you could delete. Years of comparing yourself to images of people that were filtered, photoshopped to be anything but real.

But here's what I've learned after years of photographing people, the camera doesn't show you what you look like to you. It shows you what the photographer is looking for and I am looking for something entirely different to what you expect.

There is a moment in almost every session when something shifts. The self-consciousness settles. The nerves stop. A woman stops thinking about how she looks and starts simply being present in the room.

That is the moment I wait for. Those are always the truest images.

What you experience in that shift is relief. The relief of being seen without being judged. Of taking up space and having someone say, quietly, with a camera: yes, you. Exactly as you are.

That experience, being genuinely seen, not made over or dressed up can begin to undo years of believing the opposite.

Why seeing yourself differently actually changes things

There is a growing body of understanding around what therapists and counsellors call image work, the use of photography as a tool for healing self image. Here is what many of my clients describe after receiving their images.

They use words like: I didn't recognise myself, in a good way. 

It made me feel beautiful again. 

I kept going back to look. 

I showed my daughter. 

I finally understood what my husband has been saying to me.

Something happens when we see a truthful image of ourselves, one taken with dignity and care. A photograph holds still. It lets you look without worrying. That image can become a new reference point for how you understand yourself.

I work with a minimalist style as I’m not trying to create a theatrical image. I am trying to find the quietest, most honest version of you, the one that exists before the performance begins.

I believe that every person carries inherent worth. Not earned worth, but the kind that was placed there at the very beginning and has never left, regardless of what life has layered over it. My photography is, in a very real sense, an attempt to show that.

I can't promise a session will heal everything. But I have watched women walk out of sessions standing differently. Holding their heads up. Talking about themselves more gently. 

That's why I do this.