Have you ever been looking at a photo of someone and thought to yourself, “...I don’t look like that.” and judged yourself negatively against that person’s appearance? I know I have. I look at professional photos and think things like, “wow, their complexion is flawless. I have pimples and acne scars, and my complexion is a little blotchy. Must be nice to have great genes.” and “my body has cellulite and stretch marks, I wish my skin was as smooth as theirs.”
It’s a pretty shitty feeling. I’ve been wrapped up in this heinous comparison where I never come out as worthy since I was a teenager looking through Cosmo, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Even if I had known then that I was being marketed body dysmorphia and a shrinking self esteem like I do now, I’m not sure it would have changed my perception of myself against those spreads in the magazines.
As I’m a self-taught photographer and photo editor, I’ve watched literally thousands of hours of editing tutorials. I’ve studied other boudoir photographers. I’ve taken workshops. I’ve scoured google to look at the images other photographers produce and like…I hate 80% of them. Hate. Skin looks like plastic. The marks we’ve earned living our lives are erased in service of upholding an illusion of youthful perfection, though it is worth saying I got my first stretch mark as a very young girl, so even youth isn’t exempt from the reality of human skin.
I had my first and only boudoir shoot done in 2017 by a pretty fucking popular photographer. She is also quite talented, I am not intending to smear her (which is why I am not posting the photos, and why I will not be sharing her name or her studio’s name), but I do want to share what about my shoot made me want to be a different kind of boudoir photographer, and what moved me into what I call “ethical editing”. I have googled this to make sure I’m not snaking it from other photographers, and I’ve only found it loosely used for copy editors and journalists. If I am stepping on anybody’s toes because this is their term for how they approach photo editing, please let me know.
I’m in a bigger body. Everything about me is large, really. My stature, my body size, my personality, largeness is me all over. People in bodies like mine and bigger get relegated to othering that attempts to placate us…plus size, curvy, voluptuous, the list goes on, but having spoken to a LOT of photographers over the last 21 years of shooting, I know we are not the preferred subject UNTIL it’s time to market. Photographers want the money of fat people just as bad as they want the money of skinny people. Even fat photographers fall into this trap. I have fallen into this trap early in my boudoir journey, and I’m not perfect, I am sure there are ways I have yet to unlearn about how I’m STILL othering bodies that aren’t white, cis, thin, and obviously abled.
I got my photos back from this photographer and maybe it’s because I am also a photographer, but after I picked my body apart and decried my ugliness, the first thing that jumped out at me was how I was edited. Girl. I was EDITED. I have cellulite…where was it? I have wrinkles on my face…they were erased. I was beachball smooth and I have never in my life been beachball smooth. The most egregious thing I noticed was the tweaks that had been made to my body. One photo in particular gave me an entirely rebuilt ass. A butt I did not recognize wound up attached to my backside and after I was done going, “what the actual FUCK???” through my delivered gallery, I cried.
I fucking WEPT.
Do you know what I saw in all of those photos I paid literally thousands of dollars for? I saw the flaws my photographer felt were too ugly to leave as is. I saw the way my photographer thought I should look. I saw each and every part of me that my photographer looked at and went, “ew” and then took it upon herself to determine how my body...MY body, a body I was vulnerable with and trusted her with…should look.
I hear you maybe asking if I knew those things were ugly and wanted them changed, isn’t that what boudoir is supposed to do? Didn’t I pay to be edited and retouched? I mean…no, I didn’t. I paid to feel beautiful. And it took several thousand dollars for me to realize that the experience I paid for ended up making me feel uglier than I already felt. It’s like having this quiet hunch that you aren’t up to standard, and then someone comes along saying they’ll help you see the truth about yourself, and then it turns out the truth they see about you is so much fucking uglier than you thought.
Nowhere in the process did she ask me how I wanted to look. At no point did she say, “do you want to keep your cellulite? Do you want me to edit your butt to look like an unstoppable dump truck?” I was not once given the choice about my appearance, it was just…silently assumed that I knew I was too ugly in a raw image and what I really needed was airbrushing and a rounded, lifted set of cheeks. I was mortified and ashamed and any attempt at self love from my shoot that I wanted to give myself was never going to show up. Wow. I felt like shit. But I was so deeply fucking ashamed that I praised her work to her. I never went, “hey, we need to talk about what you did to me and the way it made me feel.” I was too embarrassed.
But I took that embarrassment and told myself, “never ever ever will I do that to a client”.
So now, when you book me, we are going to talk about YOUR expectations and wants for editing. Do you want me to smooth out little bumpies from something tight fitting, or leave your clothing created rolls because you know you’re still incredible with them? Do you want to leave in your cellulite and stretch marks because you love them? Do you want me to smooth this, tuck that, the center of the process is what you want. I draw the line at making you thinner or fatter, or changing your facial angles, you look like you and you are worthy and fantastic and if you want someone to give you a wholly different body, I want to lovingly remind you I am not a plastic surgeon and I am not a magician. There are things I will do, and there are things I won’t. I will even out your skin if asked, but I will not lighten it. I will even out your beautiful little bumpies if asked, but I will not alter your body size and shape. You are the ultimate driver here, I’m just the instrument.
This is why my image turn around takes so long. I hand edit every single image to YOUR standards. I can’t do that with a filter, I can’t do that by farming out your image on Fiver, I can’t do that by pawning you off on a hired editor. You and I build the relationship, we build the trust, we do the shoot together, and I give you what you ask for. I am here for you. To empower YOU. The You-iest you, the realest you, who is full and whole and amazing, untouched and as is.
And on the female gaze…
I feel pretty confident that any femme who finds themselves on my page knows what the female gaze is, and can tell it apart from the male gaze. You may not be able to give a dissertation level info-dump on their differences, but I bet you know it when you see it. I want to clarify that I am not hating on the male gaze. A lot of clients LOVE catering to the male gaze, and it makes them feel sexy and seen and to that end, I am happy to cater to it for you. At the end of the day, your shoot with me is about you, and I’m going to represent you well.
I wish I had a better way to define “shooting to the female gaze” other than saying it is giving you agency back, and making you more than just an objectified doll. Boudoir by its very nature is a little bit objectify-y, right? It is. We don’t languidly lay about in sun drenched bedrooms in lingerie with a full beat…though if you do I would love to take this moment to say Hello, may we be best friends, and please invite me to your next languid laze sesh!...we don’t keep our mouths in a pert little almost-ready-to-kiss position (did you know there’s a name for that? It starts with an M and sounds french…like miueue…but I cannot for the life of me remember how to spell it so I can’t even google it, but phonetically it sounds like, “myuhhh”)....so boudoir is, at the very LEAST, intimating our willingness to be objectified. And you know what…
We. Can’t. Help it.
If you have been raised as a woman/femme, were born in a body assigned female at birth and present in ways we socially deem feminine, it is the siren fuckin’ call. To be objectified. To be props. To play aesthetic second fiddle to our own cravings and lusts and selves in service of upholding colonized beauty standards because it’s forever where our worth has been chained. I’m not even saying that you have to be cosplaying society’s definition of ugly at your shoot. Get your make up done! Get your hair done! Let’s see those nails, girly pop!! Tell me all about how you want to give these to a person you’re fucking, or several people you’re fucking. Or how you are going to thot it up with posting the photos! Hooray, bitch, I love that for you! Having photos in our galleries where we go, “fuck, look at me. Look at my BODY! I am an absolute DISHHHHHHHHHH.” doesn’t make you bad, or stupid, or a shit feminist.
Being a photographer who utilizes the female gaze isn’t easy to define like it is as a filmmaker (it’s actually the genre the term was coined for!), because there’s a masquerade with boudoir that almost….almost…makes boudoir shoots to the female gaze an impossible paradox. How can a still moment capture agency? Where in a photograph do you flesh out its subject as a full bodied human being with flaws, interests, hopes, and dreams and not just a shallow shell? The honest answer is you don’t, really. But there’s a difference in process and, if I’ve done my job right, in feelings that the photos themselves evoke. It’s the creation end where you feel it most, and I would like to think it shows up in the photos I deliver to you. The ones I hand edit with you in mind, and you only. Your ways of loving yourself, your unwillingness to erase any part of your body in service to bullshit beauty standards. Your wants. Your desires. Your choice.
There is nothing sexier than that.