Mondays are weird days. I wake up sore from the weekend and hopeful for the week ahead. I usually shoot a lot on the weekend and this can be rather physical. Mondays are also when I get to look back at the week and book work for the coming days and months. This morning, there were a few inquiries, but one that struck me the most because it hit at the core of why I'm a photographer in the first place.
I had a woman/future friend reach out because soon, she'll have a lumpectomy. To capture the body that she's in at the present time was why she wrote me. In her email, she thought she was weird for wanting to photograph herself during this time. If anything, I find her idea to be a bold and beautiful one that many more women and men should give themselves. These bodies we walk around in can serve us in so many ways. It gets us from point A to point B. It gives love, happiness, life, and joy. It can experience a magnitude of pleasures and an ocean's worth of pain. And, it changes. Each year, month, and day, we are evolving. Things are growing, tightening, sagging, and changing in unforeseen ways. To know that a part is going to possibly be forever altered is a moment of reflection. The sit-on-the-edge moment when the tides rest and we can see over the edge. Do we want to be able to see it again? Look back at who we were and what we looked like with a clear portrait of this vehicle we drive through life with.
So, we're going to set up some times together to capture her life and body at this stage, after surgery, and then a year from now. Our lives are the only ones we get. We might as well document them with photos that take in the art of it all.
