As I mentioned previously, I saw some photos of me recently that I wasn’t particularly enamored of. I didn’t look in those pictures how I actually felt that night. I was at a masked ball and I dressed up in fat girl gothic lolita style. I felt cute. I felt a bit sexy. I had spent ages planning what I was going to wear and amassing just the right accessories. I loved my outfit. I looked good. I know I looked good. People told me I looked good.

But then there were those photos.

And my self esteem plummeted.

You see, I am accustomed to being behind the camera, not in front of it. I cringe when people refer to me as a ‘photographer’ but I guess I am. If a photographer is someone who takes photographs, then yes, I am a photographer. I even get paid to take said photographs on occasion. I do wedding photography, I do portraits, I do landscapes, macro and some more creative arty farty type stuff.  I love taking photos. I love capturing a moment, a scene, an object, in the way that I see it so that I can then share my vision with other people. I like to capture unusual things, fragments of scenes or objects that challenge the viewer to consider an everyday item in a different way than the might usually. A lot of people wouldn’t like my more ‘creative’ photographs. They might wonder why the hell I would take a photo of the bride’s toes peeking out from under her dress, or just the back sash of the flower girl’s dress. Or the chrome door handle on a hot rod. Or my daughter not even looking at the camera.  I take photos like that because I like to. Because it fulfils a need in me. Because it is an expression of something inside me that I can’t always put words to.

When I photograph weddings, I often deal with brides who think they are ‘too fat’. I don’t enter into that discussion with them. I refuse to pander to those sorts of comments. My way of dealing with it is to take beautiful photographs that attempt to capture the essence of who this woman is and what she is feeling and experiencing on her wedding day. My aim is to record her excitement, her nervousness, her elation, the love she feels for her partner and her own unique beauty. I have photographed slim brides, inbetweenie brides and fat brides. I have gorgeous photos of slim brides, inbetweenie brides and fat brides. I have never had a client look at a photograph of themselves that I have taken and comment that they look ’so fat’. They comment on the colors, the angle, the focus, the composition, the shy smile on their face, the glow of their skin or the emotion the image evokes in them.

These women think it is me making them look good. They think it is the angle of the photo, the compostion, the light. They think it is the dress and the makeup. And sure, those things contribute to a good photograph. But I think it is more about them. I can pose them and manipulate the image before taking it and after taking it (ie photoshop) but there is only so much I can do. The innate beauty of a photograph comes from the subject, in this case, the women themselves. Without them, without what they bring to the picture, there is no picture.

So I look at the photographs of me from that night at the masked ball and I think about how I felt that night. I think of the fun I had, of how cute I felt and I remind myself that these are merely a one dimensional visual representation of that night. They are candid happy snaps. There was no manipulating of lighting or poses or angles. There is no sound, no smell, no emotion. As such, they are not wholly real. They are a but a fragment of the reality that was that night. They don’t reflect all that was, not of me or of the entire night. Just as the photographs I take at weddings and other events can never reflect everything that was that day for those people.

A picture might tell a thousand words but not all of them are true. And sometimes even a thousand words isn’t enough to capture a moment, or a person, in their entirety.