about me | theories on how and why i've become an intimate portrait artist
how did i get here?
Hello Stranger! If you’ve found this post, you may already know the basics — I’m Britt and I am a boudoir photographer based in Minneapolis, MN. I’ve been a photography nut since high school — the president of the photography club and voted “Most likely to become a photographer” because of a friend of mine who peer-pressured her whole class into creating the category and voting me into it. It was a bit of a winding path that got me starting my own photography business, but early on, about thirteen years ago now, I took on a project to do boudoir portraits for a family friend who’d just gone through a divorce, and I’ve done boudoir portraits ever since, hoping to remind more women how amazing they are and make them feel worthy of every good thing in life.
I always joke that tousling hair and designing a wardrobe are things I never thought I’d be doing as an adult. I grew up with passions for horses and books and studying — I was always in jeans and boots, always dirty, always getting a farmer tan. While other girls learned to curl their eyelashes and contour their faces, I shopped in the little boy’s section at the Goodwill. I wore men’s shorts and flip flops in the summer — weird hats, geeky sweaters and men’s neckties in the winter. I could feel that pressure to be thin, be pretty, wear makeup, show off your body, be sexy, get a boyfriend. I guess I just lumped it all together with being controlled by “the man” and refused all of it. Sometimes the world rumpled its forehead or lifted its eyebrows at me or stared for not conforming, but mostly I just didn’t care and the world let me be.
The first of my two amazing children was born when I was 19, and that’s when I saw another side of the world around me. It *did* want me to look and act and be sexy, it *did* judge me for not behaving that way, but it was pretty fucking upset when it knew that I’d actually HAD sex. Now that I was an 18-year-old pregnant woman, people were ugly, judgmental, and condescending. Men used my pregnancy as a reason to lean in, call me naughty, and breath on my neck. Women wanted to lecture me about how big a of a responsibility it is to be a parent and how I should have known better. My then-boyfriend’s parents urged me to hurry up and marry him to cover up and repent for our sins, because people were watching. There were people that meant well and people that were genuinely kind, but they weren’t loud enough to drown out the voices telling me to feel slutty and ashamed.
The world wanted one thing. And it wanted another.
What could I even be? If I wanted to please?
That was the beginning for me, I think, of spiraling down that rabbit hole of “I’m not enough,” and a sadness followed me for years that was all tangled up in proving to the world that I wasn’t stupid, wasn’t slutty, wasn’t too young to love my baby and be a good mom. The darkest years of my life were that way because of all the negative things that people assumed about me because of how I looked. I spent years trying to “look” a certain way — more mature, maternal, put-together, and older than I really was. Happier than I really was. And I tell ya what, faking it was exhausting.
And that’s more or less where we all have been, isn’t it? Your story will be different, but it will be about people wanting things from you that are so contradictory, so diverse, and so numerous that you can’t possibly deliver. It will be about feeling like you’re not enough, barely knowing who you are and then feeling like who you were is slipping away. It will be about you having expectations for yourself that are so high or thin or fast or smooth or small or curvy or perfect that there’s not room to celebrate yourself or be proud.
I think those dark years after I got pregnant are why I’ve come to really understand the importance of accepting yourself AS YOU ARE and learning to love that. It’s all that darkness that’s made me really passionate about not letting other women stay under the same cloud.
The world has made you think you’re not the right age, the right size, the right color? I want you to see just how stinkin’ gorgeous you are. They made you think your sexuality is wrong and shameful? Let’s make some art that is exactly as sensual as YOU want it to be. Someone made you think that your type of body isn’t worthy of being seen? Fuck them, let’s show ‘em what it looks like. They said you’d never be brave enough to get in front of a camera and do something that terrifies you? They don’t even KNOW what you have inside you.
We can make this world better by putting more images in it that show beautiful — natural — okay — isn’t a size or a shape or a color or a sexual preference. We can take those ideas we have about beauty being connected to our value and smash them by doing something scary and vulnerable that can make us feel powerful and worthy and whole. You ARE enough. You DO deserve it. Let’s fuckin’ do this.