I had a client a few years ago — I’ll call her M — who booked her session and then spent the entire time before it trying to talk herself out of it. She sent me three emails with variations of “I’m not sure I’m the type of person who does this.” She showed up nervous. She left crying — the good kind. She told me later that looking at her images was the first time in maybe fifteen years that she had looked at a photograph of herself and felt proud.

M is not unusual. She’s actually pretty typical of the women who come through my studio in Chicago. And her experience is why I keep doing this work.

What “the type of person who does this” actually looks like

I’ve photographed women in their 20s who were terrified and women in their 60s who walked in completely unbothered. I’ve photographed women who were celebrating a milestone, women who were recovering from something hard, women who had no particular reason except that they wanted to. I’ve photographed women who had never done anything like this and women who had done it before and wanted to do it again.

There is no type. That’s the real answer.

The idea that boudoir photography is for a certain kind of body, a certain age, a certain level of conventional attractiveness — that’s a marketing myth from a different era. What I photograph is real women. The diversity of my portfolio is the proof.

Why it matters that someone else takes the photo

This is something I think about a lot. We live in an era where everyone has a camera in their pocket. Women photograph themselves constantly — in mirrors, at good angles, with the light they know is flattering. And yet most women still hate photographs of themselves.

The difference isn’t the technical quality of the image. It’s the relationship to it.

When I photograph someone, I’m seeing her from outside her own head. I’m not seeing the thing she’s been trained to look for and hate in the mirror. I’m seeing light, shape, expression, presence. And when I make an image from that vantage point and she sees it — really sees it — something recalibrates.

That recalibration is not a small thing. It doesn’t always last forever. But it happens, and it’s real, and women remember it.

What you get to keep

The images are yours, completely. No public sharing without your explicit written permission — ever. I’ve worked with clients who were very private and clients who ended up wanting to frame something for their bedroom wall and share nothing else. Both are valid. You get to decide what happens with what we make together.

What a lot of women don’t anticipate is the feeling of having them. Just knowing they exist. One client told me she never looks at her images but she keeps them on a drive and knowing they’re there does something for her. That counted too.

The waiting doesn’t help

I say this with kindness: there is no future version of yourself who will be more ready for this than you are right now. The body you have right now, in this season of your life, is the one worth documenting. Not the hypothetical one. This one.

If you’ve been curious about this for a while, the best thing you can do is start a conversation. No commitment. Just a conversation. I promise it’ll feel less intimidating than you think.