In Defense of Posting Your Nudes on the Internet
It’s not bad to post nudes of yourself on the internet. There I said it.
It’s not bad to post nudes of yourself on the internet. There I said it.
I am a firm believer that nudity is not something that we have to keep private, save only for people we are romantically or sexually involved with, or inherently regard as sexual. Furthermore, even with respect to photos that are inherently sensual or sexual in nature, I still don’t believe that the world seeing us as sensual, sexual beings is a threat to our respectability, our humanity, or our professionalism.
Liora K Photography takes all my best nudes.
There. Now you’ve seen me naked.
How are you feeling?
I’m feeling pretty much the same. Actually, I feel closer to you, reader! You now know what the cool textural landscape of my armpit hair and stretch marks and scars from my breast reduction looks like up close, you can study the shape of the lumpy underside of them from where the surgeon rearranged all that breast tissue, you can even trace the lil squiggly vein that became visible on the bottom of one of them after my surgery.
How special!
You know what I’m not feeling now that you’ve seen me naked? Diminished or violated in any way. It turns out the two aren’t intrinsically connected!
I have been posting revealing photos of myself on the internet for years, and when I first started, I’ll admit it was scary! It’s insanely vulnerable, you have no idea if you’re going to face backlash, and you feel quite literally so effing exposed. But I immediately found that it became easier and more comfortable the more I did it. The more I shared of myself, and the more I tangibly saw that the world didn’t end when I did it, and the more I could focus on the positive things I was getting out of it instead of the Big Scary Regrets I was always told I would feel, the more free and powerful I felt.
I think there are a lot of reasons why sharing your body with the world can be incredibly valuable, but for some reason all we ever hear about is what the dangers, downsides, and terrible consequences of sharing your nudes on the internet are.
So let’s talk about some of the reasons why I think you should, if you want to, share your nudes with the world.
Seeing Bodies That Look Like Ours is Healing
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had someone comment on a photo of a client that I have shared and say something like, “Oh my god this is what my body looks like, I never see people with [insert feature here], it’s so amazing to see someone else with a body like this.”
If we rely on commercial representations of what bodies look like to determine our sense of what is normal, well, I think we all know how that ends.
The bodies that we are shown in most media represent an extremely narrow slice of the population. In fact, they barely represent them, given how edited and distorted and airbrushed those photos are. If we are going to rewrite our sense of what kinds of bodies are normal, we are going to have to share our own with each other.
When I was younger, I went through a pretty substantial phase of what I would now retrospectively describe as an eating disorder. It’s one that is extremely familiar to people my age and younger — orthorexia. This particular form of disordered eating involves an obsession with health and nutrition as the root of the neurosis, and it is often paired with an exercise obsession for a neat little package of absolutely garbage beliefs and behaviors masked as a commitment to health, fitness, and wellness. It’s a sneaky one because it’s pitched to us as a virtuous way of loving our bodies by caring for them, when in reality it’s just a barely-veiled toolset for disparaging and punishing them.
One of my most obsessive behaviors was scrolling for hours and hours and hours and hours through “fitspo” (short for “fitspiration”) content on Tumblr and Pinterest. If you’re lucky enough to have made it through your life without knowing what fitspo is, it’s basically just pictures of people with Super Hot Bods, in the traditional sense, that are supposed to serve as inspiration for you to stare at and feel a sense of purpose and motivation. Spoiler alert: this is Very Bad.
In my eating disorder recovery, one of the most instrumental steps I took was to do a complete audit and makeover of my social media feeds. I went through and unfollowed every account that even halfway reminded me of this kind of content, and I purposely sought out and followed people with diverse bodies. Suddenly, my feeds were flooded with all sorts of bodies, some of which looked like mine and some of which didn’t, and every time I opened my social media accounts my sense of what was normal was recalibrated a little more. Over time, this kind of consistent exposure to bodies of all kinds re-wrote my implicit default sense of what bodies look like.
Today’s analog of fitspo Tumblr is just…the entirety of influencer internet. We are flooded with images of a very specific type of face and body, and given the flaming hellscape that is the arbitrary and unequal enforcement of community standards, certain kinds of bodies are censored far more than others. Especially when it comes to sexy and/or revealing imagery, if we let the algorithms decide what our sense of normalcy is, it’s no wonder most of us have such a warped understanding of what bodies and sexuality are and should be like.
When I first started posting revealing photos of myself on the internet, it was only because I had seen other people who look like me do it that I felt emboldened to do so. When my clients and followers say that seeing photos of other people’s bodies makes them feel empowered not only to share their own photos, but to shift how they think about their own bodies, it makes me feel like I am part of a magical, vibrant, varied, unshakeable community. Sharing your nudes is doing the lord’s work (no seriously).
Increasing Your (Naked) Freedom in Your Body Can Help You Embrace Body Neutrality
One of the most interesting things I have noticed since having more and more people see me naked (and being in a career where I see tons of other people naked all the time) is how it has contributed to an overall sense of neutrality about my body. Of course, seeing bodies and having people see mine makes me feel warm and fuzzy and full of love for all of our beautiful forms, but it has also just made so many things about bodies feel sort of…unremarkable? In a good way!
When we hide our bodies all the time, we build up an inherent sense of significance and value about what is underneath, and moments of exposure of that hidden territory (intentional or unintentional) can feel so much more laden with value judgment than they otherwise would be. If no one has ever seen my bare stomach and then suddenly it is exposed when I reach for something on a high shelf, my first thought is going to be “oh my god that is uncharted territory for these people to see….what must they think about it?” There is suddenly an acute sense of control over how people are perceiving my body, and I might suddenly worry about how to best present it so that it looks good when they do see it.
This is further exacerbated if I have an implicit belief that my particular body part is weird or abnormal in some way. Now, not only are they seeing some part of my body for the first time, they are seeing a weird version of that body part. “I never see people with [insert body part here] that looks like mine, so mine must be extra worthy of attention and scrutiny when it is revealed!!”
But being immersed in a world where bodies, my own and others, are exposed all the time actually sort of diminishes my sense of the significance of whatever my particular body parts look like. I have seen one zillion boobs of all shapes and sizes and textures and colors, so the particular details of mine don’t stand out in one way or another, good or bad, in my mind. I have seen so many people’s bodies that look so vastly different that when my body changes in some way and looks more like one kind of body or another, that change feels unremarkable — a mere wave in the ever-shifting ocean of all the bodies that exist.
The goal of feeling better about your body overall is extremely worthy; I hope everyone finds a way to love their body someday. But there’s also such a relief in just letting your body exist. The neutrality that comes from diverse body visibility is such a breath of fresh air, and choosing to share your body with the world can help lift that burden of constant heightened significance and value judgment that keeping it hidden all the time can foster.
The Dangers Are…Unclear At Best
There are a lot of fucking weirdos out there. And it is very important that we protect ourselves from them as best we can.
But I reject that we have to hide our bodies from the world just because some people are fucking weirdos.
In the current digital age where basically anyone can access almost anything about us that we post on the internet, keeping ourselves safe from weirdos is crucial. Not posting information that makes it easier for a weirdo to find you (location information, private data, travel plans, etc.) is a great baseline. Having good safety practices in place when you’re meeting new people (bring a friend to pick up that lamp you found on Facebook marketplace, meet new dates in a public place, pick a spot a few blocks away to hand off your drugs, whatever) is key.
Hiding your boobs? I’m not sure how that one helps.
I think a lot of warnings about the dangers of posting revealing photos of yourself on the internet can be reduced to the following threats: threat of professional or interpersonal repercussions, threat of embarrassment, threat to dignity, and threat of future regret. These are often conflated with true safety concerns, but they’re very different considerations. Of course each person will have to decide how they feel about each of these threats, but here are my own personal feelings about them:
Threat of professional or interpersonal repercussions: In my own personal line of work and personal circle of friends, family, and acquaintances, this is not a big problem. I am a boudoir photographer and my whole life is naked people, so nudity is an extremely unremarkable phenomenon in my world. I am fortunate that my career can really only be helped by the world seeing my boobs. And in my experience, any professional or personal opportunities that are closed to me because the world knows what my boobs look like are not ones that I am interested in.
Now, to be clear, for some people and in some professional domains, there might be very real professional consequences to having revealing photos of themselves on the internet, and it is one hundred percent reasonable to take that into consideration in making this decision. But it isn’t always, obviously true for everyone that having nudes on the internet is a professional death sentence. And for some people (like me), the benefits outweigh the risks and losses. This won’t be true for everyone, but you are allowed to decide that it is for you. And for what it’s worth, almost all of my clients who choose to share their photos on the internet are in different professional fields than I am, so this is not just an idiosyncratic possibility in my own life.
Threat of embarrassment: I actually think the fact that I have shared my own nudes of my own volition makes it harder to embarrass me. Everyone already knows what my pubes look like, you can’t hurt me. Of course, some weirdo could do some shit like photoshop my boobs onto Mitch McConnell’s body or make some sort of deepfake porn of me and a hammerhead shark, but frankly I think they should be more embarrassed by that than I should.
Threat to dignity: My sense of dignity is mine to determine, not someone else’s. I don’t feel undignified because people know what my boobs look like, and if someone else thinks I am undignified I really don’t lose any sleep about it.
Threat of future regret: The internet is forever. Sharing things on the internet means releasing control over being able to undo that decision, and making peace with the possibility that if I change my mind someday about wanting my nudes on the internet I won’t be able to ensure that I can remove them. But I can only make this decision with as much care and thoughtfulness as I make any other permanent decision. I can’t ensure that I will never ever feel differently about it in the future, but we make all sorts of permanent decisions (tattoos, relationships, finances, children) that we can’t ensure we won’t regret in the future; we just have to make the most thoughtful decision we can. There are big and serious and life-changing benefits to sharing your body with the world, and I have decided that those outweigh whatever hypothetical (and, I think, unlikely) regret I could possibly feel in the future.
I won’t attempt a full analysis of the relationship between actual physical safety and posting revealing photos of yourself on the internet, both because I don’t know what the actual statistics are, if any exist, about the relationship between the two, and because each person will have a different personal calculus of the risk/benefit tradeoffs of having their nudes be visible to the public. I also don’t deny that there might be some physical safety considerations that are important to take into account in making the decision. But I will say this: I am not aware of any reputable data that indicates that posting nudes of yourself on the internet significantly increases your risk of personal physical harm, so in my own personal calculus, the benefits I have found of sharing my body on the internet outweigh those hypothetical considerations.
Agency Matters Most
There is a big, big, big, big difference between sharing your own body on the internet on your terms and of your own volition and someone else leaking your nudes without your consent. One is an empowered choice, the other is a sex crime.
I am talking about the first one here.
Making an informed, thoughtful choice to post or allow the posting of photos of your body can be incredibly freeing and empowering. You should be able to have the final say over where and in what manner images of your body are posted. Every client who works with me has full control over the privacy of their images (not even just for boudoir — your headshots are private if you want them to be too!) When you book a boudoir shoot with me, for example, you receive a model release form where you get to select your preferences for who will get to see the photos and in what manner (if any) I am permitted to share them on the internet. Here are the options that every client gets to choose from:
I always want agency to be at the forefront of the entire process because, when given the opportunity, people’s experiences of sharing their bodies with the world consensually and on their terms can be incredibly therapeutic. I never want anyone to feel pressured, of course, but more than that, I want to give them the space to actively choose to share themselves if they have the inclination to. And feel only good about it afterward!
I think that the way that we often talk about the perils of nudes being posted on the internet is quite disempowering. It is so often framed as a thing that happens to people without their consent, rarely as something that people have informed agency about. And even when we talk about it being done consensually, there is this implication of naïveté and vapidness that casts the decision to post nudes as something that is done by people who are acting impulsively, uncritically, and without due consideration of the consequences.
But the truth is that it is possible to make an informed, thoughtful, positive choice to share your body on the internet and then do so without regretting it.
Agency changes everything. As one of my clients put it, “If someone shared it without me knowing, then of course it’s a big fat NO. But if someone seeing my naked body makes them feel good or reassured that all bodies are beautiful, then hell to the yes show my tits and ass off baby!!!!”
Ultimately, the choice to share your body on the internet should be one hundred million percent yours. No one should ever feel pressured to do so if they don’t want, but I am also here to yell from the other side of the room: nor should anyone feel pressured not to if it’s something they actively and thoughtfully want to do.
Fuck it, it’s your body, it’s a gift to us all should you choose to share it.
The Definitive Guide to Non-Cheesy Boudoir Photography
Boudoir photography gets a bad rap for being full of cheese. And for good reason…
The world of boudoir photography gets a bad rap for being full of cheese. And for good reason — there is so much boudoir photography out there that is deeply cheesy. It’s stiff, it’s corny, it’s photoshopped within an inch of its life, and it’s catering to a very specific gaze. But it doesn’t have to be that way!
I get clients all the time who come to me and say “I’m nervous to do a boudoir shoot because I’m afraid I’m going to feel stupid”. And honestly, I think that fear comes from the fact that so much boudoir depicts people doing things that look stupid. So much lip biting, unnatural poses, and “bedroom eyes” that verge more on Clockwork Orange than America’s Next Top Model. Seriously, whoever came up with the “look at me like you have a sexy secret” prompt should be punished by having to scroll through the thousands of “you look more like you have to poop” results that this leads to.
Anyone who has ever tried to take sexy selfies knows that a good portion of them come out looking deeply stupid. Trying to look sexy in a photo is usually a recipe for feeling like an alien in a skin suit. Maybe for some people it feels like a natural thing, but I think for most of us it results in sort of inauthentic, self-conscious looking results. The key to avoiding this is to basically forget everything you’ve heard about how to get sexy photos. And, even more importantly, you might have to forget a lot of things you’ve been taught about what is sexy to begin with.
Whether you’re a boudoir client looking for tips on how to feel non-stupid during your shoot or a boudoir photographer struggling to capture natural and sensual looking photos in your boudoir work, check out my guide to non-cheesy boudoir photography and toss the whole traditional boudoir playbook out the window.
No Static Posing
“Will you pose me?”
Erm, yes and no. I will direct you the whole time; you will never feel abandoned to fend for yourself. But I won’t pose you. Posing is a strategy for directing that, at least for boudoir, all but guarantees that your photos will come out looking stiff and unnatural. Static posing, especially when it involves micromanaging every pinky, every lock of hair, and every angle is usually pretty uncomfortable for the subject. It’s so much to hold in your brain all at once, and it makes you feel like you have to be hyper-controlled to be sexy. It’s basically saying, “sexiness is precarious, and we have to construct it very carefully and then capture it quickly before it disintegrates”. Ew.
I tell my boudoir clients to stay in motion nearly the entire time we’re shooting. The key, however, is the kind of motion. I tell them to move slowly, intuitively, and with their breath. I direct them to stretch, explore length and fluidity, and to move at about half speed of how they usually move. Not only does this keep you more in touch with your body and its sensations, it also prevents the I’m-holding-in-a-fart look while we’re exploring what should be a deeply relaxing experience.
I give my boudoir clients plenty of direction as we’re shooting, but I like to let the client’s natural way of moving and being in their body take the lead. I want people to move in ways that feel natural and intuitive to them so that the resulting photos look like them, not like something I am projecting onto them.
Keep It Tactile
Touch yourself.
Like a lot.
Touch your skin, touch your hair, touch your clothes, touch the environment, touch everything. Boudoir is best when it’s a very touchy experience. This is especially easy and fun when you’re doing couples boudoir, since you get to just rub your hands all over your babe. But it’s equally important in solo boudoir sessions! Not only does it keep you grounded in sensuality, it also results in the hottest photos.
Feeling First
I always start my boudoir sessions by having my clients take a few minutes to settle into their bodies. Stretch, breathe, check in with the nooks and crannies, and tune into the sensations in their bodies that so many of us spend our days tuning out of. Then, I tell them that throughout the shoot, I want them to focus on what their body feels like, not what it looks like.
It might sound counterintuitive to ignore what you look like when you’re having someone photograph you, but I guarantee you that even if your goal is to walk away with hot photos, thinking the whole time about what you look like will not be the way to accomplish that. It makes you self-conscious, hyper-aware of all the things that you don’t like about the way you look in an effort to make sure those things aren’t coming through, and just takes you out of your body.
When I look at boudoir photos, I want to feel something. So much boudoir photography comes across as hollow and disconnected, and I think that’s because not nearly enough attention is being paid to the connection between how you feel during the shoot and the way the photos look. If you feel uncomfortable, your photos will probably read as uncomfortable. If you feel in tune with your body and you’re moving from a place of sensuality and breath, getting hot photos is just a matter of me capturing the energy that’s already in front of me.
It’s your job to just be in touch with your body. A good photographer will know how to turn that into hot photos.
Forget About Eye Contact
I’d say in about 99% of the photos I take of myself where I’m looking at the camera, my face looks nothing like what I think it looks like. In my head, I’m giving Tyra. In reality, I’m giving double dose of Benadryl.
Some people are really excellent at photo eyes. They look engaged, connected, relaxed, alluring. Most of those people are professional models. And a select few boudoir clients I’ve had who have just really mastered the non-awkward sexy eye contact.
For most of us, doing an intentionally sexy face looking into the camera is extremely unnatural. And why should it be natural! Most of us don’t spend much time having professional photos taken of us, much less professional sexy photos, so why should we know how to tap into that in a shoot? Plus as soon as we get in front of the camera, most of us suddenly feel hyper self-conscious, which we already know translates into uncomfortable photos.
There are plenty of tricks photographers, myself included, use all the time to get natural eye contact in photo sessions, but actually my favorite way to avoid weird faces is to just skip the eye contact all together in a boudoir shoot. At least for most of the session. I really love when boudoir photos have a sort of almost voyeuristic aesthetic to them, like if you didn’t know any better you’d think that the subject didn’t even know the photographer was in the room. Closed eyes are actually incredible hot when what we’re trying to evoke is a deeply sensual experience — what could be more sensual than disappearing into sensations so much that you have to close your eyes and just feel them?
So you can skip the bedroom eyes and just focus on what your body is feeling, and just let your face follow naturally. It never leads me astray.
Fuck “Flattering”
I could write a dissertation about how bullshit the notion of “flattering” is. It’s one of those sneaky words that sounds like it means something like “you at your best” but, when you dig deeper, usually means something like “approximating a particular set of beauty standards”. There might be a very limited set of cases where that word could mean something non-toxic, but I think in most cases it’s a shifty little synonym for things like “slimmer”, “smaller”, “longer and leaner”, “curvier in the right ways”, blah blah blah. And fuck that.
I think that photographers focusing on flattering-ness, and especially when they let that language creep into the way they direct or talk to clients about their bodies, is one of the worst things they can do, even (and especially) when their stated goal is to help clients embrace their bodies. And given how common that goal is and how many boudoir photographers use that kind of body-positive language in their branding and messaging, I think a lot of us have a long way to go in really unpacking the more subtle ways that weird and gross standards permeate how we think about bodies and beauty.
We all have insecurities. Clients often come into their shoots and say, “I’m insecure about this part of my body” or “can you make me look more XYZ?” What I always tell them is this:
“We don’t have to pretend those insecurities don’t exist, but I also don’t want to let them steer the ship here. What if we just let them sit quietly in the corner while we shoot? They’ll be available for you to pick them back up when we’re done if you want, but I don’t think they deserve to be in charge in this room. Let’s see what happens when we just give them a break for a few hours.”
Limit Retouching
Even after the shoot ends, the commitment so many photographers have to enforcing bullshit body standards endures. So much boudoir is photoshopped to DEATH, so that the resulting images look so distorted and airbrushed that clients look more like Bratz dolls than adult human beings. WHY?? WHY.
Bodies have natural texture. They have shape and color and asymmetry and they take up space and thank god for that. When we try to smooth away all of the interesting edges and details that bodies contain, every boudoir photo looks the same. It could be a photo of absolutely anyone, and we’ve completely lost the plot of what brings most people to boudoir in the first place — to celebrate and capture them.
What I tell people when they ask me if I will retouch their photos is this: I will only retouch things that don’t represent what your body normally looks like. If you have a random scratch on your face that isn’t usually there, or you got a gnarly sunburn last weekend, or you ran into your coffee table and have a big ol’ bruise on your shin, I’m happy to edit that out because that’s not a basic part of what your body looks like. But curves, fat, cellulite, hair, wrinkles, etc. — that’s just you babyyyyyy, and that stays. FaceTune can eat my ass.
De-Gender It
Most boudoir is targeting at cis women. Like, nearly all of it. Most boudoir photographers even explicit use that language in their marketing — “helping women embrace themselves”, “celebrating the female form”, etc. And like, wow what a bummer to limit it to only that!
I get LOTS of clients who come to me looking for a queer boudoir photographer or a boudoir photographer who specifically captures more than just cis women. This is partly because, obviously, more than just cis women are looking for boudoir photographers. But it’s also because boudoir photography can be such a fun and exciting and therapeutic way to explore gender expression! Lots of those clients are specifically interested in exploring non-traditional gender presentation in their shoot, and some of them are even using their shoot to explore some of those aspects of themselves for the first time ever.
I cannot overstate what an honor it is to be able to help people do that kind of self-exploration. But it’s a kind of trust that you can only earn as a photographer if you are actively working to dismantle those traditional notions of who boudoir is for and examine how our collective concepts of what is sexy and attractive are deeply, deeply intertwined with prescriptive gender roles.
Anyway, gender is a potato. And boudoir is for everyone.
Find Your Own Flavor of Sexy
Boudoir is at least partially about capturing something sexy. But wtf does that mean? What is sexy?
I think there are as many ways of being sexy as their are people. For some people, their sexy is joyful. For some, it’s moody and mysterious. For others, it’s playful. For still others, it’s grungy and ugly. Whatever your particular flavor of sexy is, I want to capture that, not some sort of one-size-fits-all notion of sexiness.
When I have a consultation with a boudoir client, I always like to have them compile a little bit of visual inspiration for me (bless a Pinterest board) and send me a little reflection on what they hope to explore and capture in the shoot and a few adjectives that capture the mood they want to evoke. This gives me a good reference point for who they are and what best captures their personal sense of what feels sexy to them. Because who the fuck am I to decide that for them?
Think Outside the Genre
Okay I could write another dissertation about the absolute flaming hot takes that some people have about what does and does not count as boudoir. A lot of photographers have some ^VERY STRONG VIEWS^ about this one.
I call a lot of what I do boudoir photography both because it’s an easy search term for clients to use to find me and also because that’s the genre that a lot of my work grew out of. Some people might look at some of my work and insist, “that’s intimate portraiture! that’s fine art nude photography! that’s erotica! that’s porn! that’s just regular portraiture!”
Apart from the fact that who gives a shit, I actually also think that this kind of rigid attachment to genre categories is counterproductive for photographers. It incentivizes narrowness and uniformity in their work, it stifles creative exploration for both them and their clients, and it blinds one to real and inspiring opportunities to create something that really captures something true for their clients. In fact, new clients often come to me and say that my work called to them precisely because it wasn’t what they were expecting when they searched for boudoir photography.
Sometimes what a client or photographer wants to explore in a shoot is not neatly categorizable in that way, or straddles multiple genres of photography, and if that means the final result doesn’t look like traditional boudoir photography then w h o c a r e s? Pursuit of non-dogmatic creative inspiration and authenticity is a powerful antidote to cheese, so follow the anti-cheese, whatever genre you want to call it.
BREATHE
The last and perhaps most important key to non-cheesy boudoir photography is breath. Breath and then more breath and then after you’re done breathing do some more breathing. No holding your breath, no sucking in your stomach so you can only take shallow breaths, no frozen, static, butthole-clenching posing. Breeeeeeattttthhhhhhheee.
Non-cheesy boudoir photography is not only possible, it’s easier than the cheese. It’s more authentic, more honest, more creative, and most importantly, more you. All you have to do is forget everything you’ve been told about how to do it.
Crying in the club
I cry at every wedding I photograph. But not at the parts you’d think.
I cry at every wedding I photograph. But not at the parts you’d think. I mean fine, I cry at those parts too. But the part I lose my shit at more than anything else is….the dance floor. Seriously, as soon as Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” comes on and people are jumping around and screaming the lyrics in each other’s faces and everyone has long since abandoned their uncomfortable heels in favor of a barefoot boogie, it’s weep o’clock for me. Thank god for my camera’s face-tracking autofocus function because I’m usually crying too much to look through the viewfinder at that point.
I think the thing that gets me the most about the dance floor is that it is purely about joy and community at that point. The stressful parts of the day are behind you, the logistics have all been navigated, the boxes have all been checked, and you get to just watch your grandfather and your best friend from college do the Electric Slide together (okay I know I said I’m a nontraditional wedding photographer but I am an unapologetic Electric Slide/Cha Cha Slide/Cupid Shuffle/etc. fan, do not come for me about this).
The dance-off was so amped even my camera’s focus couldn’t keep up, but tbh I couldn’t care less.
What if your whole wedding day felt like this?
What if instead of a day of structured traditions and rituals that don’t hold any personal meaning for you, you got to make the rules and wear whatever you want, invite whomever you want, and do whatever you want?
Those are the kinds of weddings I want to photograph.
Eden-Marcel watches their new spouse Jaq perform a dance they choreographed just for this day at a sunset elopement at White Sands National Monument, NM.
I’m primarily a queer wedding photographer (though you certainly don’t have to be queer to have me photograph your beautiful day), which means most of my wedding clients are already nontraditional. Of these already nontraditional clients, many of them also want a day that doesn’t involve the highly gendered rituals that define the mainstream wedding industry. When I have my first meeting with a potential wedding client, the first things I always ask them are:
What are you envisioning for your day?
What is important to you on this day?
What feels exciting to you about the day?
When you look at your wedding photos, what do you want to feel?
A moment of pure triumph after a wedding three entire pandemic years of obstacles in the making.
I love starting the conversation this way because I have no idea what the wedding is going to look like. I try not to come into this meeting assuming that I know anything about what the day will include. I have photographed backyard weddings, forest weddings, desert weddings, mansion party weddings (one of which began with a MURDER MYSTERY PARTY???), weddings where the entire biological family was in attendance, weddings where not a single biological family member was in attendance, weddings with metamours and queer platonic partners in comet lovers in attendance, sober weddings, second weddings, and elopements on sand dunes at the ends of the earth.
Not to mention some of the sickest non-traditional wedding fashion you can imagine.
So here’s my number one job as your wedding photographer: whatever your day looks like, when you look at your wedding photos, I want them to make you feel like I feel when I watch everyone scream along to Whitney Houston on the dance floor. Or the Fall-Out-Boy-marathon-turned-group-hug at the end of the night below.
As far as I’m concerned, the only crucial ingredients for an amazing wedding are love, community, and cuddle huddles.
And vendors who care about getting your pronouns right.
Celebrating a successful Fall Out Boy scream-a-thon.