‘It was no longer a gift for my husband. It was all for me’: four women on how boudoir photography changed their lives
Now a hugely popular photographic genre, many women pay thousands to have intimate portraits taken of themselves by a professional. What do they get out of it?
A few hours into Brittany Witt’s boudoir shoot, with the mimosas kicking in and the music going strong, the photographer asked: “How do we feel about some completely nude photos?” Witt was lying on the bed in lingerie, in a studio in Texas, and hadn’t considered nudity an option. “I was like: ‘OK, we’re on this trust path.’” She undressed. The photographer, JoAnna Moore, covered Witt with body oil and squirted her with water, then asked her “to crawl across the floor with my full trust,” Witt says. “I did so. The pose was nude, and it was completely open. I wasn’t covered with a sheet. It was all out, it was all open, and it brought that worst level of self-doubt. I was terrified.”
Witt, 33, has come to see that terror as an important part of her experience. She used to be a competitive weightlifter. “I had a very masculine aura. I showed up in strength,” she says. At school and work – in the construction side of the oil and gas industry – she was “type A – scheduler, planner, had everything together, kind of led the group”. A turbulent home life when she was growing up led her to develop robust protection mechanisms which, in adulthood, acted as a block to relationships – issues she had been addressing with a life coach. But in that moment, on all-fours in Moore’s studio: “I felt those protections stripped away. There was nothing to hide behind, literally, figuratively.”
The resulting photograph is one of her favourites. “It was the combination of everything I was, and it looked phenomenal. You can tell who I thought I was in that picture. And what box Ithought I fit in – but also all the things Ididn’t think I was, and which that picture allowed me to be. It’s a strength position. But you also have this intense vulnerability and openness, softness and beauty. It’s the picture that captured everything.”
Witt is one of a growing number of women who are paying for a boudoir shoot – often up to several thousands of dollars or pounds. Initially popular among brides looking for an add-on to their wedding photography, or a gift to their partner, boudoir has evolved into its own genre. All kinds of reasons lead women – and it is still mostly women, though male or “dudeoir” photography is on the rise too – to boudoir, from milestone birthdays, a cancer diagnosis, divorce, surviving domestic abuse to weight loss and gain, pregnancy and childbirth.
“There is no one this is off-limits to,” says Shawn Black, who runs the Association of International Boudoir Photographers, and who has himself been photographed naked under a sheet. “It’s not taboo, it’s not scandalous, it’s not pornography. My philosophy has nothing to do with sex. It has to do with strength, it has to do with confidence, with pulling that thing out of you that makes you shine. I’ve shot everyone from your everyday housewife to politicians. I’ve shot attorneys, judges, doctors, surgeons. I’ve shot from age 21 to 73.”
Many women show no one their photos. So why do it? Judging by Witt’s experience, something seems to happen in the space of the boudoir studio that is about more than undressing and being photographed – and whatever it is makes women feel their lives are permanently changed.
Susan Lausier, 61, has been photographed by Black in Boston each year since turning 58, when a younger friend encouraged her to go. It was not the sort of thing Lausier would normally do. “Hell, no. I was super shy,” she says. At high school she had a core group of three friends, didn’t do any extracurricular activities and found eye contact hard. “I didn’t want to take up the attention … Let me melt into the background. Never thought I was attractive. Never comfortable in my skin.” At parties, she would sit on the couch and wait for others to initiate conversation.
We’re brought up to criticise ourselves. But in that moment, and when I shared my photos, I wanted everybody to look at me
At first, Lausier booked her shoot as a gift for her husband. “It was coming up to my 30th wedding anniversary. I’m like, you know what? Let me do this.” But after five minutes, Black showed her the back of his camera. “And I’m like: ‘That’s not me.’” The woman Lausier saw was lying on a bed with her feet against a headboard, looking back directly at the camera. At that moment, she says: “It was no longer a gift for my husband. It was all for me.”
Lausier walked out of the studio “feeling like I could do anything”. The experience “has transformed everything” and “absolutely gone into my regular life” – but not in the ways she expected.
Lausier had to wait a couple of months for her studio “reveal”. The slideshow of photographs is a key component of the boudoir experience. Black, who has been shooting boudoir since 2013, asks people to attend alone. “I always aim for one of three reactions,” he says. “Stunned silence, tears, or uncontrollable profanity.”
For Lausier, it was stunned silence. “I never felt so beautiful.”
Her husband, the intended beneficiary, was nonplussed when he saw the images. He liked them, but he couldn’t understand why Lausier had thought them necessary. Shortly after her reveal, Lausier was laid off from her job in a hospital, where she had worked for 38 years. “What the heck do I do now?” she thought. Her boxing gym was advertising for a general manager – not something she would normally have considered. But her shoot made her feel differently about herself. “Let me just try it. What’s the worst that can happen?” she told herself. She went for the job “with full force” and got it.
So what did the shoot give Lausier that she didn’t have before – and couldn’t get some other way? “I try to explain it and say: ‘This is how I felt going in. This is how I felt coming out. This is how I felt with my reveal.’ And I know there’s a personal transformation that happens internally in the moment. Ifelt the transformation,” she says. One of Lausier’s images hangs on the bedroom wall, and the photo albums sit on her coffee table – but most of all, she says: “It’s released me from my thoughts. I dress the same [as before the shoot], but I don’t compare myself to anybody any more. It’s just like: ‘This is me.’ And I never thought ‘me’ was enough for other people.”
Lausier’s experience of a lived change that extends far beyond the photographic studio is echoed by others. Makeda Blake-Robinson, 38, from south London,initially booked in with photographer Elizabeth Okoh “to embrace” her altered body shape after becoming a mother. She is a district nurse, and during the Covid pandemic, when close family members were vulnerable with diabetes, “I felt stuck,” she says. “I was getting scared.” Her marriage had ended, and at 33,she wrote her will. “I might not have much,” she says, but it was important to put things in place for her son.
It was in this frame of mind, with a sharpened sense of mortality, and the sense that “it was nice to live”, that she met Okoh at a studio in Battersea. She didn’t tell friends or family what she was doing. “I bought it myself. I did it by myself.” As a parent, “You always overextend yourself. Sometimes you miss yourself,” she says. As a child, she wanted to be a model for C&A or Tammy Girl, but never told anyone. In her photographs, she styled herself and saw “a Makeda who is confident, a go-getter”. Her pictures hang on the walls of her home – her dad sometimes wishes he didn’t have to see his daughter in Victoria’s Secret when he visits. She knows she doesn’t always look like that, but says: “It’s enough to know Ican look like that.”
Blake-Robinson has since had four more shoots. Since her first, she has “felt able to travel by myself”. She has taken solo holidays – something she would never have done before. “I know now that I can do things by myself,” she says. She used to follow beauty trends – threading, waxing, laser. But now it is enough “to be comfortable within myself”. At the last Notting Hill carnival, she swerved her usual baggy T-shirt for a wire bra and peacock feathers.
Stories of transformation abound in the world of boudoir. Witt started a new relationship around the time of her shoot. Her photographs helped her to “show up differently” with her new partner, at work, and in her friendships, she says. The self she saw “helped me take off all the armour of the different roles I play”. In a few weeks, she and her partner are getting married.
But why is it necessary to strip off to have this experience? If it’s not about sex – as all these women say – why do it in lingerie or less? “There’s a desire to be fully seen, not just physically but emotionally,” Witt says. “To be fully loved for what we are as human beings, as women.”
“Society as a whole has done a great job of telling women what they should and shouldn’t look like,” says Moore, who photographed Witt. “Boudoir strips all that away. When you take away your clothes, you’re left to deal with what you actually look like, what you are at your core.” When women undress for a boudoir shoot, they divest themselves of their preconceptions of what a desirable body looks like and are able to look at their body as it is, “appreciating it and realising that it was handcrafted and created beautifully”.
Moore switched from working as a paralegal to wedding photography. Her first foray into boudoir was to ask members of her Bible study group to pose for her. At her studios in New York and Texas, she usually initiates a “stern conversation” with clients, advising them that she won’t edit out bodily features. From cellulite to tummy tuck scars, C-section scars and stretch marks, “If it’s going to be part of your body six months from now, it’s staying in the photo.” Posing clients both to show and to hide these features offers them the chance, Moore says, to like what they had previously feared or judged. To see themselves with a different eye. “This is where the mental change happens.”
She won’t edit out bodily features – from cellulite to tummy tuck scars, C-section scars and stretch marks
“It’s magical,” says Kay Davies, 42. She has been photographed twice, by Laura Slater AKA Lumiere Photographic, once alone and once with her partner. Her favourite image, the one she put above her bed, shows her head tipped back to reveal the scar from the tracheostomy she had when she contracted Covid and pneumonia in 2020, and spent 33 days in a coma. “I’ve been told in no uncertain terms, I was nearly gone,” she says. The shoot in North Yorkshire, on a random Monday, was a way to celebrate the body that got her through it. “I had a bra and a thong on, and I was more confident in that than I am sometimes in clothes,” she says. “We’re brought up to criticise ourselves. But in that moment, and when I shared my photos [on social media], I wanted everybody to look at me. I wanted everybody to go: ‘Yeah, she looks good.’”
Davies spent £1,000 on her shoots. She would like to bottle the feeling that overwhelmed her in Slater’s studio – “I was so strong, I could do anything” – then “give it to people when they’re feeling a bit down”. Her photographs act as her own bottled cure. She looks at them, on her phone or memory stick, or in her box of prints, “probably once a month”, when she’s “not feeling great”, or just to look again at something that felt so good. “It’s a bit weird thinking I want to look at myself in underwear, but honestly the day I did it, I did not want that day to end.”
The photographs offer people a way to see themselves as they’ve never pictured themselves. They can overturn the damage of decades of objectification – the word “empowering” is emblazoned across most photographers’ websites and testimonials are full of the same, the “release” and “renewal” – but aren’t the images objectifying?
“I can only take on what it was for me,” Witt says. “And for me it’s not that. Can I control if that’s what it is to other people? No.”
“I think the intent of the photos makes it not objectification,” Moore says. She prefers to think of them as a form of self-appreciation. “I feel like that might not be a bad thing. Being raised in the church, we are supposed to love others as we love ourselves. Which means we have to love ourselves first.”
And although the images might look like the product of a male gaze, maybe that is the boudoir sleight of hand: to imitate that, while really offering a benign, appreciative and generous lens through which a person is not only seen differently, but taught to see themselves differently. As Blake-Robinson puts it: “I feel like I’m a star in my own show.”