I am not a boudoir photographer.
Over the last year I’ve often heard my work referred to as boudoir photography. I haven’t corrected this because at first I didn’t think the label mattered and I didn’t want to risk offending anyone who practices or partakes in boudoir photography. But the more I think about it the more I think the label does matter, a little.
To talk about why, we have to define boudoir photography. This is surprisingly difficult. It’s a slippery term, one that emerged slowly and haphazardly to package and market a product rather than describe a visual style or encompass an art form.
Photography is a startlingly new invention. Human art seems to be about 70,000 years old. Photography is about 200 years old. Boudoir photography, named as such, is only about 40 years old. So it’s been around for, give or take, 0.06% of the known history of art. In other words, it is not part of the grand tradition of human creation.
A man named Stuart Naideth claims to have invented it in the 1980s in Orange County, a time and place not altogether known for its humanism or gender equality. Naideth has a goatee and describes his financial success thusly: “We fuss over the women. We try to put them in a fantasy world. If they don’t end up looking like a Playmate of the Month when we get done, then, at the very least, they’ll feel like one. And the reaction from the men has been very positive.”
In its broadest outline, boudoir photography is a commercial service in which someone, usually a woman, who is not a professional model and usually has little to no experience in front of a camera, hires a photographer to take their photo in a state of undress, usually in lingerie, usually with professional hair and makeup, usually in a luxurious studio environment (satin sheets on a prop bed, leather sofas, soft window light filtering through gauzy curtains), usually posed and lit in a way to conceal so-called flaws (stretch marks, cellulite, scars) and highlight so-called assets (cleavage, the curve of an ass), and usually heavily retouched. The intended usage of boudoir photos is usually personal affirmation, either to make the subject feel good about their body and appearance or to be given as an erotic gift to their partner, or both. Boudoir photos are usually not sexually explicit, with marketing usually focused on “sensuality” over “sexuality” and recently with heavy emphasis placed on self-love (in a self-care rather than masturbatory way).
There are as many variations to boudoir photography as there are boudoir photographers, and any of these “usually”s can and do vary. Some boudoir photographers emphasize zero retouching, some offer “erotica” sessions with explicit sexuality, some work outdoors, some highlight marginalized bodies, some cater to male clients, etc.; but as a loose definition this gives you a good enough idea of what we’re talking about.
Boudoir photography is differentiated from pin-up or porn by its intended market — these photos are commissioned by their subjects and are for personal use. Their intended viewership is usually the subject and possibly the subject’s partner and occasionally the subject’s social media followers.
Boudoir photos are commercial products. They are commissioned and purchased and delivered in the same way you might buy a piece of monogrammed luggage: they are unique in the sense that the body in the photo or initials on the suitcase are yours and not someone else’s, but generic in the sense that you more or less know what you’re purchasing and get exactly what you pay for.
Etymologically “boudoir” (French for a woman’s sitting room) comes from a word meaning to sulk or to pout. Boudoir photography usually features pouty faces — plumped lips, heavily made-up bedroom eyes, sex hair.
Functionally, boudoir is a marketing term. It’s shorthand for a type of product, and a euphemism. If you tell your mother-in-law or co-workers that you’re going to go take professional naked pictures, they’ll judge you. If you tell them you’re going to a boudoir shoot, they’ll applaud and ask for your photographer’s contact info.
Boudoir’s association with the wedding-industrial complex, in which “bridal boudoir” has become a common add-on to wedding photography packages, trumpets its respectability. Of course it’s not obscene, brides do it as a gift to their husbands and brides by definition aren’t sluts.
Many boudoir photographers emphasize the “tasteful” nature of their work. What exactly is meant by that is a little unclear, though one frequent theme is a de-emphasis on genitalia. “Don’t worry,” promises one boudoir studio on their FAQ page, “even if you opt to go fully nude we’ll never take open-leg shots!”
Why? Why this emphasis on performing sex (bedroom eyes and big hair and expensive lingerie) without allowing the mess and pleasure that comes from actually feeling it?
A reminder: when NASA sent the first probe out of our solar system, emblazoned with a drawing of a naked human man and woman, they ensured the woman had no visible labia because Western European art didn’t traditionally depict labia and they worried that the quarter-inch labial line in the original draft would be seen by the public as “pornographic.”
Another reminder: the term “pornography” had nothing to do with explicitness — etymologically it refers to money rather than sex. Porn isn’t defined by what’s shown or not shown, it’s defined by commodification and commercialization.
My frustration with boudoir as an industry is that it commodifies and commercializes our bodies, our sexuality, and our self-esteem. (I’m not taking shots at specific photographers here — I think that many who call their work “boudoir” mischaracterize what is in fact beautiful and humane art. What I’m taking exception to is the industry as a whole, which has a life and conventions of its own that are divorced from any one individual working within it.)
Boudoir promises to make you feel better about yourself, to present a you who you will not recognize, a you who can only be brought out through elaborate hair, makeup, posing, and retouching, a you who performs sexy without the inconvenience of anything hard or wet between your legs. For the privilege of seeing yourself this way, magazine-ready and sexily unsexed, you will be charged a great deal of money and will be told you owe it to yourself.
Boudoir photographers have a habit of referring to their prices as “investment,” as though you’re buying stocks or bonds. This is meant, I think, to make it feel less like you’re paying for validation and more like you’re transmuting money, alchemically, into self-love, and will one day see a return on it in the form of improved mental health or body image. You might! And if you do, that’s wonderful: I’m not dismissing the potential good. But the term — like so many boudoir conventions that can’t escape their 1980s Southern California roots — is manipulative.
The cultural critic Christine Emba, talking about dating apps and social media platforms, condemns them for “monetizing insecurity.” The conventions of boudoir marketing too often do the same.
Money is not antithetical to art and money is not antithetical to sex. But it’s an uneasy bedfellow with love. If someone tells you they can make you love yourself for a nominal fee, regard them with suspicion.
I don’t think marketing is inherently bad. I own a green wool cable-knit sweater that was aggressively marketed to me on Instagram and for which I paid way too much money. It brings me joy. I have no issue with the fact that I was essentially coerced into buying it. The underlying message of most marketing is “If you buy our product you’ll be [hotter/cooler/better/whatever],” and I do feel hotter when I wear the sweater, so fair play. But the coercion endemic in the wellness industry gives me pause because it doesn’t just offer affirmations (“You’ll look great in this sweater!”), it also implies the opposite (“If you don’t buy this sweater you’re fugly!”) and so preys on our insecurities.
There’s an argument to be made that boudoir photography is not really so different from, say, headshot photography, which also deals in selling affirming images. But the trouble is that in our culture an unclothed body just isn’t the same as a face. There’s a vulnerability and intimacy involved which shouldn’t be unthinkingly commodified.
I believe bodies are sacred. I believe art is sacred. I believe the sacred should not be commercialized. Up-charging for add-ons — “Make your shoot even better by paying a little extra for [blank]” — implies a willingness on the part of the photographer to hold their own creativity for ransom, to deliberately make inferior art if the client can’t afford to splurge. Breaking the creation of intimate images of naked bodies down into dollars and cents, slapping an exact market value on the “product” you create, feels obscene. It reduces art to content. It trivializes something that is not trivial.
This is why my shoots are all pay-what-you-can. If I were in a position to only work for free I would. Money should never be an impediment to art. It’s not unusual to spend, when all is said and done, upwards of two or three thousand dollars for a boudoir session. If you can afford that and want to pay me commensurately for the time we spend working together, I’ll happily take your money because like all of us I need to eat — but don’t do it because I promise luxury or affirmation or a return on your “investment.” Pay me well if you have the money because by so doing you fund my ability to work with the person who can’t pay at all.
I am not a boudoir photographer because my work is not designed to package your body into a product. If you choose to work with me I will not “make” you look beautiful. We will work together to capture the beauty that’s inherent in us all, and we will create art we both believe in.
I am not a boudoir photographer because my work is not designed to make you feel better about yourself. It may do that — it often does do that — but that is not its intent. My work is intended to celebrate what it feels like to be human, in all our messy glory. It is not tasteful. Nothing about being human is.