Boudoir Photography and Confidence: What 20 Years Has Taught Me
I have photographed people professionally for twenty years, and for seventeen of those years, I have specialized in boudoir photography in Denver.
Which means I have spent an insane number of hours talking to women while they’re sitting in a hair and makeup chair, standing in lingerie wondering what the hell to do with their hands, looking at the back of my camera in disbelief, and sitting next to me during their reveal and ordering appointment. And that doesn’t even include the work before or after the session, coaching them through what to wear, that yes, they can in fact do this, and holy shit look how amazing you look – YES that’s really you.
After all those years, I have learned a few things about boudoir photography and confidence – mostly that so many of us have it backwards.
We tend to think confidence is something we’re supposed to acquire before we do the thing.
I’ll book the boudoir session when I’m more confident. I’ll wear that when I’m more confident. When ____ happens, I’ll be more confident. I’ll go on the trip when I’m more confident. When I do ________, I’ll finally be more confident. I’ll put myself out there when I’m more confident. I’ll do it when I lose the weight, when I get stronger, when the kids are older, when life calms down, when I feel better about myself, when I finally become this imaginary future version of myself who apparently wakes up one morning completely fearless.
I’ve photographed enough women to know this: completely fearless & confident isn’t reality.
Confident women still get nervous.
Do you need to be confident to book a boudoir session? Absolutely not.
Some of the most confident women I know have walked into my Denver boudoir studio and immediately told me they were terrified.
They’ve questioned their outfits, worried about their bodies, warned me repeatedly that they are awkward, told me they don’t know how to pose, and DEFINITELY assured me they’re not photogenic.
Confidence doesn’t mean walking into a room without insecurity, and it doesn’t mean never feeling nervous. Sometimes confidence looks like walking through the door while your brain is screaming WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING? And doing it anyway.
The nerves don’t mean you’re not confident enough to do something. Sometimes doing the thing you’re nervous about is exactly how confidence gets built.
And when women are nervous about being in front of my camera, there is one particular sentence I hear ALL. THE. TIME.
“I’m not photogenic.”
“Photogenic” is not some talent that is magically bestowed upon a certain percentage of the population when they’re born.
I cannot tell you how many women have looked me directly in the face and said, “I am NOT photogenic,” usually with great conviction, as though there was an official government hearing and a panel of experts reached this conclusion.
Here’s what twenty years behind a camera has taught me: there aren’t special humans who were born knowing exactly how to position their bodies in front of a camera.
Being “photogenic” is a skill that ANYONE can learn, not a talent that is born.
My clients don’t need to know their angles, where to put their hands, or how to make the right facial expressions. That’s my job. I know how light works, how bodies move, and how to pose someone down to their fingertips. After seventeen years specializing in Denver boudoir photography, I can usually see the tiny adjustment that changes an entire photograph before my client even realizes what I’m changing.
You aren’t bad at being photographed because you don’t know how to be photographed. You don’t need to walk into my studio already knowing how to do any of this.
That’s why you hire me.
Women are absolutely capable of looking beautiful in photographs – but we have spent so many years looking at ourselves through a completely different lens that we have been CONDITIONED to accept as normal.
A lens of self judgment, contempt, and criticism.
We are our own worst critics.
Women see themselves differently than they see everyone else.
A woman can look at another woman with stretch marks, scars, wrinkles, softness, cellulite, a belly, thick thighs, small breasts, large breasts, gray hair, whatever it happens to be, and think she’s beautiful. Then she looks at the exact same thing on herself and somehow it becomes evidence against her.
We give other women context and compassion. We see the whole person. But when we look at ourselves, sometimes we zoom directly into whatever we’ve decided is wrong.
Sometimes my job is simply showing someone the same grace she automatically gives everyone else, by showing her a photograph that highlights the beautiful physical features that were already there.
That doesn’t mean one boudoir session suddenly erases every complicated feeling you’ve ever had about your body.
You don’t have to love your body first.
I don’t think you need to stand naked in front of the mirror every morning declaring that you love every square inch of your body. If that works for you, fantastic. But sometimes “body positivity” becomes another impossible standard women think they’re failing. Now we’re not only supposed to have the perfect body, we’re apparently supposed to LOVE IT ALL THE TIME too.
No.
Your body is allowed to be complicated. You can want to change something and still respect yourself now. You can be uncomfortable with parts of your body and still deserve photographs. You can be working toward health or strength or change without treating your current body like an unacceptable draft version.
And you absolutely do not have to reach some arbitrary goal weight before you’re allowed to exist in photographs. I’ve photographed women through pregnancies, weight changes, surgeries, illness, aging, divorce, marriage, motherhood, and approximately every other thing bodies and lives can go through.
There isn’t one correct version of you that deserves to be documented or celebrated.
You don’t have to love your body before a boudoir session.
Do I want you to? Absolutely. But that is an intensely personal journey that everyone has to walk through on their own, working through each individual issue, voice, or negative feedback they’ve received.
I’m just a guide to walk you through one piece of that.
And I’m damn good at it.
That personal part is important. I’ve also learned there isn’t a demographic where confidence suddenly appears.
Confidence doesn’t have a magical age.
I’ve photographed women in their twenties who were completely comfortable in their bodies, and women in their sixties who were not. I’ve photographed women in their twenties who were terrified to be in front of my camera, and women decades older who walked in ready to take their clothes off before hair and makeup was even finished.
Age can absolutely change the way we see ourselves. Sometimes we get older and simply run out of fucks to give about things that used to consume us, especially when it comes to someone else’s opinion of us. Sometimes we don’t.
There is no magical birthday where confidence suddenly arrives, because confidence is incredibly personal.
After twenty years of photographing women across different ages and stages of life, I haven’t found an age where women are universally more confident. I’ve found individual women with individual relationships with their bodies, shaped by entirely different lives and experiences.
We spend a lot of time waiting to feel ready for our lives.
Ready to wear the thing, take the photo, take up space, choose ourselves, or do something simply because we want to.
All of this nuance and personal experience, as well as my professional experience in working with over a thousand women is likely why I’ve stopped thinking of confidence as a destination at all – but as a choice.
We can CHOOSE to do something we’ve always wanted to do, even if we don’t feel 100% confident doing it yet.
We can CHOOSE to step into an uncomfortable situation – not dangerous, just outside of our comfort zones – knowing that it scares us but we will grow through it.
We can CHOOSE to wear the thing, take the trip, book the session, speak up, take up space, or say yes to something simply because we want to. We don’t need any additional justification.
We can CHOOSE to stop waiting for some future version of ourselves to finally feel ready.
Confidence isn’t waking up one morning without fear, insecurity or a single fuck left to give.
Confidence is knowing those things are there and choosing not to let them decide our lives.
Over the last twenty years, I’ve watched women make that choice again and again. Not because they suddenly became fearless. Not because they woke up loving every inch of their bodies. Not because they finally reached some magical age, weight, size, or place in their lives where insecurity disappeared.
They chose to do something they wanted to do while some of those feelings were still there.
You don’t have to become thinner, younger, braver, sexier, more comfortable, more healed, or more confident before you’re allowed to celebrate yourself.
The fact that each of us is even alive at all required an incomprehensible series of events – and yet somehow, you’re here. Alive.
