I'm 47, and I notice my face changing. Of course I do.
I notice the lines that weren't there before, the grey hairs, the changes around my eyes, the age spots...and the fact that my neck seems to be ageing at approximately three times the speed of the rest of me, which frankly feels a little unnecessary. I notice my body changing too.
I'm not going to sit here pretending I've reached some magnificent level of enlightenment where I look in the mirror every morning and adore every single thing I see. I don't. I have good days and bad days, photographs of myself I love and photographs where my eyes go straight to the bit I wish looked different. I'm not standing outside this looking in. I'm one of the women I'm talking about.
And perhaps that's why I notice it so much when I'm photographing other women. I see them subtly move behind their husbands when I lift my camera. I see mums position a child in front of their stomach. I hear "can you get rid of my chin," "can you make me look thinner," "can you Photoshop that bit," "don't get my arms." Sometimes it's said as a joke, but I can see the discomfort sitting underneath it.
Here's the interesting part. I'm looking through the camera at the same woman, and I'm usually seeing something completely different. I'm watching the way she laughs with her kids, the expression she makes when her husband says something ridiculous, her eyes, her personality, the little mannerisms that make her recognisably her. Yes, I'm also thinking about light and angles and where I'm standing, that's my job, and there are plenty of ways to photograph a woman beautifully without pretending her body is something it isn't. But I'm not looking at her thinking, God, we'd better do something about that stomach.
I'm just not.
One photography job has stayed with me
I once photographed a woman in her early 60s with her husband at their home, and later again with her extended family. She looked through those photographs and talked about how wonderful everybody looked, her children, her grandchildren, all of it beautiful. Then she made a comment about the "old lady" in them.
Herself.
I remember feeling really sad, because I hadn't seen an old lady who needed fixing. I'd seen a woman in her early 60s surrounded by her grown children and grandchildren, someone who belonged right in the middle of those photographs. She saw her age before she saw herself, and that has stayed with me, because I wonder how many of us do exactly the same thing.
When did photographs become evidence of everything that's "wrong" with us?
Think about how we actually look at photographs of ourselves. We can have four people we love standing beside us, everybody laughing, a genuinely beautiful moment captured.... and somehow our eyes bypass the whole story and go straight to look at my stomach, my arms look huge, look at those wrinkles, I've got three chins. I know because I do it too.
But here's something photography has taught me. The people who love you don't look at photographs of you the way you look at photographs of yourself. Your children aren't looking at the photograph thinking about the size of your waist, they're seeing Mum. Your partner isn't calculating the number of lines around your eyes, they're seeing the expression they've watched a thousand times. And one day those photographs aren't going to be evidence of whether you successfully looked younger than your age.
They're going to be evidence that you were there.
And this is why I'm increasingly drawn to photographing women over 40
I'm interested in women at this stage of life because I'm living it too. Forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, bodies change, faces change, hair changes, sometimes hair disappears altogether, and by then there are whole chapters written across our faces and bodies. I don't think my job as a photographer is to erase those chapters.
My job is to photograph you beautifully. There's a difference. I can use beautiful light, help you choose clothing, direct you, use angles that flatter your body without hiding you behind another human being. And yes, I retouch photographs. But I don't want to photograph you at 52 and hand you back a digitally reconstructed 32 year old. I want you to recognise yourself.
And that applies to boudoir too
Maybe especially boudoir. I don't think you need to lose 20 kilos before you're allowed to have beautiful photographs of your body. You don't have to reach your goal weight. You don't need Botox first. You don't need to suddenly become outrageously confident and stride into my studio wearing lingerie while Beyoncé mysteriously starts playing and a wind machine appears.
You can be nervous. You can have a stomach, stretch marks, bits that aren't located precisely where they were at 27. Hello, same. And you can still want photographs where you look bloody fantastic. Those things can coexist. Wanting to be photographed beautifully doesn't require pretending that ageing isn't happening.
Maybe that's what I want my photographs to say
Not look how young I made her look. Not even look how confident I made her. Maybe simply, look at her. There she is, at 40, at 47, at 55, at 63, at 72, not waiting until she loses weight, not hiding behind her children, not apologising for taking up space in the photograph. Just existing in this particular chapter of her life and deciding that this version of herself deserves to be remembered too.
I'm beginning to think ageing well has far less to do with looking younger than we imagine.
Maybe part of it is simply allowing ourselves to keep being seen.
