Introducing: The Body Stories Session
Storytelling meets portraiture.
For years my work as a boudoir photographer has been centered on telling stories about bodies, intimacy, queerness, and sensuality. Being a queer boudoir photographer means seeing bodies as the site of non-traditional self-expression, and that means exploring truths about embodiment that don’t always fit neatly into the boudoir genre. So when I devised the Body Stories Session, I knew I wanted it to be first and foremost a storytelling medium.
This is the intimate portrait session format of my dreams.
Here’s how it works.
This session is first and foremost a storytelling endeavor. The Body Stories Session is an introspective exploration of where you are with your body, a kind of snapshot in time of what your relationship with your body is like right now.
1. Reflection
Before the shoot, we start with an in-depth conversation about what your relationship with your body is looking like right now and what kind of story about your body we want to explore in the session.
2. Collaborative Planning
Next, we devise a vision for how we want to tell that story through photos. We talk aesthetic, artistic inspiration, and creative play. Together, we talk about what kind of visual storytelling strategy would best capture your truths about your relationship with your body.
3. The Shoot
You bring your body and heart, I bring my camera, we talk and play and explore and witness.
4. Sharing Your Story
This step, as is true in all my sessions, is entirely up to you. But this kind of session is a way to share your story in some form or another. Whether it's making a private print book of your session and your story for you to look back at years from now or sharing your story with the world, there are so many ways this kind of session can serve as a starting point for you to explore your truths, commemorate your relationship with your body exactly as it is, and find community with people whose truths intersect with yours more than you could possibly imagine.
Alright, I’m hooked.
What does this look like?
"My goals for my relationship with my body are somewhere between neutrality and positivity. I want to see it and just be good. Content. Not think about it 24/7. I just want to see it in a mirror and go, damn, you look good, and that just continue on, on my day. I want to see it as the beautiful, sexy, sensual thing it is, and not starve it anymore. Just let it be. Let it be free.
Movement and being in my sensuality makes me feel so powerful because I’m just feeling it versus looking at it. I’m not really thinking how I look, more just how I feel. I feel more embodied and just think how amazing it is my body can move and feel the way it is.
If my body could talk to me, it would tell me how freaking strong and sexy it is. To see the legs I’ve built that take me through life (even though I hate it most of the time). To see the core strength I have. To see all the beautiful lines and curves on my waist and my back. It is a body to be worshipped and admired. It is a fucking temple.
If I could talk to my body, I would say I’m sorry for hating you most of the time. I’m sorry I starve you of food, and I’m sorry when I overeat to cause you pain. I’m sorry that you get the wrath of my unhappiness with my life, because you have been nothing but consistently there, strong, powerful, and standing. You are a magnetic and sensual force that make anyone who sees it go to their knees in admiration. You are so desired by so many. And I’m just sorry I can’t see that when I’m in my shit. You deserve so much more."
- Samanee
Excerpts from the Body Stories Project that inspired this format:
“Growing up I never received a sex-ed class. This was not due to religion, but because I moved right before my sophomore year at one high school (where they taught it) and then entered a new high school which exclusively taught sex-ed freshman year. I believe this led to an overall fear, anxiety, and just general confusion when it came to my body. In my church, I was aware of how showing cleavage was a bad thing, that sex before marriage was the ultimate sin, and that men were the head of the family. Women were kind and nurturing but never the one who had the final say in arguments or the last say in a family discussion. When I was in youth group I went to an Abstinence conference called the "Silver Ring Thing". This was a rock concert sermon geared towards unsuspecting teens about how their lives would be over if they had sex before marriage. They would bring up people who had had sex and they would discuss how it really hurt their first year of marriage. How they had given away a vital part of themselves that they could never get back. If you had sex you were then coming to your future husband or wife as "used goods". We were told that by putting on this silver ring we were making a pledge to ourselves and the Lord to be pure until marriage. If we wanted to break our pledge, we had to flush the ring down the toilet. I put that ring on and quickly adapted to the idea that my body and my sexuality were something to be covered, something precious, something that would depreciate over time if I gave it away. If I gave it away, maybe I would never get a husband. Which was something I desperately longed for.
In the church, it was easy to make things black and white. That way you could have a clear sense of right and wrong. This was a clear rubric to hold on to, to establish and follow in order to be a good person. However for me, it became the idea that if I ever messed up, I would be severely punished. I would be impure, and I would never be good enough for anyone. This idea was wrapped around my sexuality, my body. It wasn't until college where I realized I was attractive. That I had a figure. I saw other girls able to hook up with boys and experience their sexuality. For me, it was an endless game of making out since I refused to do anything further. Then it became the game of everything but actual vaginal sex. I began to be afraid to hook up with guys because I thought they wouldn't be interested if I wasn't going to have sex with them. I had put myself into a situation where I couldn't win. I was not pure enough for the Christian men, while simultaneously not being sexual enough for the ‘secular’ men.”
- Jessie
“A deeply significant theme in traditional Judaism is purity/ritual cleanliness. For the most part it's not literal cleanliness, but they get conflated, especially when it comes to women. There's a whole section of law surrounding menstruation called nidah. Menstruation makes you unclean. You shouldn't touch others when you're menstruating, and a week after your period ends you have to go to the mikvah (ritual baths) and immerse yourself in sight of a witness in order to be clean again.
I feel reluctant to talk about this, even though I'm no longer Orthodox, because it's one of those things Orthodox Jews don't talk about with outsiders, especially in modern times. It's obviously not a good look. But it's really important to the female experience in Judaism, because this inherent uncleanliness is a large part of the halachic (legal) justification for excluding women from participation in Jewish life. We can't be part of prayer groups, or be rabbis, or study Torah to the same level that men do, etc, because from the outside perspective there's a 50 percent chance we're unclean at any given time.
This was an extremely damaging environment to grow up in. It took me a long time to understand that I'm agender in part because biological sex is such an entrenched part of this religion. My body made me unclean, and my body prevented me from participating intellectually in a culture that prizes intellect and scholarship. It felt incredibly unfair, and fostered a lot of resentment in me, towards this culture but also towards myself and my body. Among the prayers said every morning there's one that differs between men and women. Women say, ‘thank you God for making me according to your will.’ Men say, ‘thank you God for not making me a woman.’ For the longest time I was bitter not just that men said that, but that I couldn't. It didn't matter how smart I was, or how good a scholar I could have been. I would always be cut off from participation because of this body I was cursed to inhabit.”
- Em
“My mother loved that her kids were brown (she’s white) and she thought that by the time we were adults, the entire world would be mixed. Or that it wouldn’t even be a discussion. It’s crazy seeing how different my siblings lives are because we all look so different. My sister looks white and is treated white. My brothers look brown and are treated brown. I’m often too white to be brown or too brown to be white. I’ve found that a lot of people feel VERY comfortable sharing their racism with me and my sister when they assume we’re white.
I have a half - brother who is fully Indian. He looks Indian, he is being raised Hindu, he speaks multiple languages. Since he’s been alive I’ve seen how little connection I have to my Indian-ness. My father didn’t really provide us with much sense of cultural identity, which is why I feel more ‘brown’ than Indian or mixed.
My body is part of me, so I don’t feel a separation between how I look and who I am. But I guess a lot of people don’t feel like I match who I am supposed to be.
If you’re fat, the assumption is that you must hate your body and hate being fat and that I must be trying to fix myself. Friends (close friends!) and family tell me that I look like I’ve lost weight like that is supposed to be the best compliment ever. (To be fair, I spent like 10 years boring everyone with my anti-inflammatory diets and juice cleanses). When I take yoga class at a new studio, the teachers will often tell me that I should come back! I’ll start to get skinny! Obviously, because I’m fat, I must never do yoga or exercise. I can’t be trusted to know my own body. On dating apps, I describe myself as fat. I’ll get messages that say ‘you’re not fat, you’re curvy.’ I am fat. I have no problem with being fat and I love how much my fat body can do. My body is not a problem to be fixed and it takes a lot of work to remember that when even the people closest to me operate on the assumption that I hate my body, and that I should. When I was in college I lost about 40 lbs in just a couple months. It was not healthy and physically I felt horrible all the time. No one saw a problem with it. People would literally run up to me on campus and tell me how proud they were of me. I guess because I was finally ‘fixing’ myself.
A couple years ago I actually started sleeping. Most of my life I had only slept about 4 hours a night. Sleeping more and not dieting and not exercising every free moment has made me a lot happier and sometimes unhappier and also made me realize that your body is supposed to feel ok. I'm not supposed to be tired and hungry all the time. I didn't know that. I think I'm lucky in that I can be happy even if I'm not happy with how I look. Like, yes, life would be easier if I were beautiful, but without beauty, I have a lot more freedom and I can focus on what I want, what my body wants.”
- Victoria
“It was the fall of 2017. I had just come back to the country for a small stint back at catering, as my restaurant job had fired me before I went to Berlin, on my first international trip, and I was preparing to start rehearsals for my run as the Emcee in the last national tour of Sam Mendes’ Cabaret. I was, most clearly, in a state of complete calm, centeredness, and confidence…
My apartment at the time was in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and was a quaint spot with high ceilings, lots of sun, and the biggest noise pollution and roach problem I have ever witnessed, due to its proximity to the front door and six large trash bins. Versailles? Never heard of her. In this palace I had half-awoken one night and felt a deep sense of dread.
I’d recently realized that my fate for baldness was not, in fact, something that ‘only happens if your mom’s dad is bald. That’s how the genes work’ (Molly Zebrondowski, 2001), and that my hair loss was only stall-able, not avoidable nor fixable. So, when I awoke in this bug infested apartment, the dream of ever returning to the beauty of Berlin quickly fading, and the terror of helming a national tour while losing my hair mounting, my sleep-addled brain immediately compiled all of this stress and pinned it upon the most logical conclusion: I was most definitely being attacked by a super-hybrid of lice and bedbugs, which had clearly burrowed into my scalp, causing this hair loss, and which had now set their minuscule eyes on eating away at my brain, driving me mad. Sound logic.
I stood for near a half hour, drowsily yet maniacally, combing through my loathe-able hairline with my shaking fingers, searching for the tiny insects, and both freaking out and commenting on my freak out in some terrible bout of self-loathing meeting self-awareness. I knew, in that moment, that I was going into another darkness with my body image issue days, and that my hair would never be innocuous to me ever again.”
- Erik
Every single person has a story to tell about their body. I can’t wait to hear yours.
Investment
$850
Includes:
Pre-shoot storytelling consultation
90 minute portrait session
Full digital gallery of high res images
$50 print credit
payment plans available
