Let Me Tell You Something I Know From Standing on Both Sides of The Camera

There was a period of my life when I could look in the mirror and no longer see myself clearly.

I could see my body that I always had. But now I could identify every individual feature and my perception of the woman looking back at me had become so tangled up in comparison that I no longer knew which thoughts were actually mine.

At one point, I dated someone whose relationship with pornography—and specific fixation on ONLY women with very large breasts—became deeply disruptive to the way I saw myself.

This is NOT a story about blaming other women. It never was.

The women on the screen had not done anything to me. Women with bodies different from mine were never my enemy. But when one very specific kind of body is repeatedly held in front of you as the object of someone’s desire, it can become almost impossible not to wonder what your own body is supposedly "missing".

I began comparing myself constantly and the comparison was never fair, but that did not make it feel any less real.

I started looking at my reflection as if it were evidence.

My breasts weren’t large enough. My proportions weren’t right. My body wasn’t exciting enough. I could stand in front of a mirror and, instead of seeing an entire woman, immediately search for the parts that seemed least likely to compete.

And there is something uniquely painful about feeling like you are being compared with a category you can never become.

It doesn’t matter how many times you tell yourself that pornography is fantasy, that bodies come in infinite shapes, or that another woman’s beauty does not subtract from your own. When that wound is repeatedly touched, logic does not always reach it.

Eventually, I was no longer seeing my reflection. I was seeing myself through what I imagined someone else’s eyes to be.

That disconnection followed me long after the relationship itself. It affected how I got dressed, how I felt being photographed, how I understood desire and how quickly I could find something wrong with an otherwise perfectly good photograph of myself.

It changed the way I occupied my own body which was a seemingly never-ending feeling of anxiety.

That is part of the reason I have such deep empathy for women who tell me they hate being photographed. When a woman says, “I’m not photogenic,” I know she may be saying much more than that.

She may be remembering every unkind comment someone made about her body. She may be carrying the experience of being cheated on, overlooked or compared. She may have spent years watching her body change through motherhood, illness, age, grief or survival. She may have learned to look at herself through the eyes of someone who never deserved that much influence over her reflection.

Sometimes “I hate pictures of myself” really means, “I don’t know how to look at myself without looking for what’s wrong.”

I understand that feeling because I have lived inside it.

I also know that confidence is not a permanent destination I reached one day and never had to think about again. I still have moments when an old insecurity tries to speak for me. The difference is that I recognize its voice now and ALSO know that it's not mine. I know that not every thought I have about my body is the truth—and not every thought originated with me.

Photography became one of the ways I began separating the two.

There is a strange honesty in a deliberately made photograph. Yes, posing matters. Lighting matters. Angles matter. I use all of them intentionally because they are part of the art. But none of those things invent the woman in the image. They create the conditions for her to see what insecurity has been interrupting. And also gives her the real life experience to start looking at social media and marketing differently. That is what I want women to understand when they look at my work.

The women in my photographs did not all arrive feeling confident. They did not walk through my door already seeing themselves the way you see them in the finished image. THEY ALL were nervous. Many were certain they would be the exception—the one woman I could not photograph beautifully.

I have never judged them for that fear.

How could I?

I know what it is like to want the photograph and simultaneously believe you could never look like the woman in it. I know what it is like to think you need a different body before you are allowed to feel desirable. I know how convincing a distorted reflection can become when you have stared into it for long enough.

So when I tell a woman that I understand, it is not part of a sales pitch.

I do really mean it.

I do not believe a boudoir session magically heals every wound we carry about our bodies. But I do believe there is power in choosing, for once, to look at yourself with intention instead of criticism. To let yourself take up the entire frame.

To see softness without calling it a flaw. To see sensuality without measuring it against another woman’s. To see your body as something more than a collection of parts being graded for someone else’s approval.

You may have learned to see yourself through somebody else’s preferences.

But your reflection was never supposed to belong to them.

It belongs to you.

And you are always allowed to take it back.

—Bri