“I'm not photogenic”

“I'm not photogenic.” I hear it almost every time in the first few minutes, said laughing or half under the breath, and every time I feel like asking: which photograph did you learn that from?

I understand, really. In front of a stranger with a camera in their hands you feel truly looked at, and in everyday life that almost never happens. Many of the young women who come to me are doing this for the first time. Some came to give themselves a little confidence, others because photography frightened them and they wanted to look it in the face, others still without finding the courage to say no. That is fine. There are also those who already know what they want, or who are looking for confirmation of their beauty, and that is a wish I respect.

The face you know is the one in the mirror and in a few photographs that went wrong, with the wrong light, the phone too close, a smile put on in a hurry because someone was waiting. From that you built an idea of yourself, and it is natural to have one. Someone who looks at you searching for real expressions sees another person. They see how your gaze changes when you talk about what you love, where the light rests on your face, how you move when you stop controlling yourself. They do not see better than you do, they see without the story you carry with you, without the comparisons and without the words someone said to you one day and you never forgot. That is why, sometimes, in front of a photograph, you say: is that really me?

Trusting other eyes takes a little courage, and I am not asking for all of it at once. You do not need to know how to pose or where to put your hands. I take care of the light and the right moment, and if something does not work it is my job to fix, not a flaw of yours. It takes time too, and we take as much as is needed: we begin by talking, and the camera forgets itself.

Imagine yourself twenty years from now. A photograph you do not take today, you will not find anywhere then. You cannot go back to that face, that light, that period of your life when you were exactly like this. I believe that one day you would give those images more value than many things that seem important today, because a photograph is memory. It tells you, and the people you love, that you were there, in exactly that way, in that moment. Think how much you would want a photograph of someone dear to you as they were at twenty-five, just one, even an imperfect one. Nobody, looking at it, has ever wondered whether that person was photogenic. They see a person who was there.

And if the photograph is printed, it stays. You can hold it in your hand, keep it in a drawer, hang it on a wall, leave it to those who come after. A screen goes dark, paper grows older along with you.

When the images arrive there is almost always a moment of silence, then someone smiles. That is the part I like best. If you think you are not photogenic, come anyway. Afterwards you will tell me how it went.