Body-Image: What’s The Problem, Pt 1

When it comes to taking pictures, how do you react? As a photographer, I constantly face one powerful element that determines how we think and feel about being in front of the camera. Now, there are various personality and character traits that influence how we relate to our pictures but this time, I’ll focus on just one: body-image. It affects us profoundly! Our body-image impacts us so much that it makes some avoid taking pictures altogether, while others find joy in having the camera pointed at them.

Body image is the mental picture that we have of our physical bodies and how we think and feel about that imagined self-portrait. It’s how we see ourselves in front of the mirror, and how we conceptualized our overall appearance everywhere else.

What’s The Problem?

Well, though each of us is the creators of our own self-image, often, this mental portrait is an unfavorable one. As such, we develop sabotaging self-talk about how we look in all types of situations, from going about our daily activities, to how we anticipate we’ll look at a formal dinner, to how we appear in pictures. Through photography, I encounter the effects of people’s self-images more poignantly than before I worked with a camera. Self-image guides everyone’s way of relating to their photographs. It governs how models and clients go into a photoshoot, react during the shoot and how they view their pictures when they are fully edited.

Your self-talk is the verbal mirror of your self-image. The words and phrases that you use about yourself becomes a narrative that you play for yourself AND share with others. Indeed, this narrative is in direct correlation to the picture that you created about your physical body.

Is your self-talk about your looks empowering or does it sabotage your feelings and distorts negatively how you think you look?

Now, I’m no psychologist; I’m speaking strictly from my experience as a photographer. Let’s look into this example of two fictitious people, Susan and John. They represent a favorable and an unfavorable self-talk narratives.

Susan has a favorable self-image and so her self-talk goes like this:

• I like my smile
• My hair always has such good volume
• I really like how I look in leggings

Over decades, John created an unfavorable self-image. His self-talk is sabotaging:

• I am looking too old now
• These ten extra pounds are really showing and it’s not good
• My nose…it’s always been a problem

When it comes to taking pictures, it doesn’t take a scientist to bet on who:

1. Awaits a shoot with excitement
2. Takes feedback positively during the session
3. Is likely to love the pictures when they’re fully edited

VERSUS

1. Who is most likely anxious leading up to the shoot
2. Tends to takes feedback as a sign of physical faults
3. View finished pictures with apprehension

I’m certain each of us agrees that Susan is more likely to have an overall positive experience with her photoshoot. Whereas John will struggle with self-doubt, insecurity about his looks and general anxiety. I wrote about this exact example in this article about Baldomero, a kind and caring Army veteran who expressed to me apprehension about posing because he was not young.

What if John’s self-talk (above) is the filter through which he goes shopping for groceries, meeting buddies for Monday Night Football, driving across town, and even when walking up to his workplace? No wonder John would be nervous about a photoshoot and may tend to stay away from cameras.

Haven’t many of us have experienced self-talk similar John’s at some point? Hence, when it comes to having our own picture taken, we automatically turn up the self-sabotaging chatter. Our heart rate goes up, hands sweat, a flock of thoughts flood our mind that adds anxiety. It happens instantly! At a family gathering, a cousin announces, “Group picture time!” and what rushes to our mind is that sabotaging talk, I better hide my belly or I’m always the stumpy or lanky one in pictures. It’s not fun is it? Yet, as contrary as it may seem, photography can help your self-image. In Part 2, I’ll go into how photography has empowered others including my own self.

What Is Your Self-Talk?

In this, Part 1, I challenge you to become more in touch with the words and phrases that you use to describe your physical image. Which are empowering and which are sabotaging you?

Keep in mind that our self-image is merely a perception. It’s not real as in having two legs or a scar across an eyebrow. How we feel about our legs and that scar is part of our self-image and how we feel is based on a perception that we created. As such, we can always change our perception now matter how unmovable it may seem. That’s what we’ll discuss in Part 2. For now, I encourage your to take note or make a list of the words and phrases that make up your self-talk. Consider how you may improve the sabotaging self-talk and also get in tough with your favorable self-talk.

Explore your self-image and evaluate your self-talk. What do you struggle with and what empowers you? Feel free to share any experience, perspective or question that you may have, below.