I collaborate regularly with Dr. Jean Robey for artistic purposes. She made a comment to me this week that got me to thinking.
She said that she had an elderly patient that had overlooked himself his entire life. That statement moved me. It seemed rather tragic. She went on to talk about how people can overlook themselves in so many different ways. Women, for instance, can easily overlook their beauty. They can go through life not realizing that they are beautiful. They can even reject their beauty and believe themselves ugly. How often I see this in my photographing women. My specialty is to make women look beautiful in images. Most women cry when they see the images because they are seeing a beauty in themselves that they had not recognized before. They usually think that it will require heavy photoshop retouching to make them look beautiful, but I use as little photoshop as possible. I want the image to still look like them. I want them, and others, to be able to recognize them. If I change them so much that they no longer look like themselves, then I've actually failed because I really then saying that they are not beautiful; I am saying that I had to make them look like someone else in order to make them beautiful. I would then be confirming their fear that that are not beautiful. My goal is to find the beauty that already exists within them and display it. Proving how beautiful they really are, just by being themselves.