I recently photographed this beautiful woman pregnant with her second child. I could tell she was a little nervous when she walked into my studio, just like most of the women who walk into my space. I can only imagine what women must be thinking when they first meet me, I think probably something like, "Is she going to make me get naked right away? Do I want to be nude? Why are there huge photographs of bare breast-feeding women hanging all over her walls? I wonder what my husband/partner/lover/kids/parents will think?"

Most women I meet think that having photographs taken of themselves is vain, why would we do such a thing? I can't help but ask, why wouldn't we take photos of our preciousness? Let's love ourselves like we love our lovers and like we love our children! Let's make prints of ourselves and admire our beauty! Or at least, let's try, let's practice.

I love scars and cellulite and stretch marks and pimples an wrinkles and wheelchairs and canes and ALL of those things we normally see erased or not represented in a photograph that we would typically praise as beautiful. I love all the beautiful things we haven't seen in photographs in my lifetime. But the thing is, most of us have a really hard time seeing the things we think should be photoshopped away. I use to photoshop out my big ol' pores and my dark circles under my eyes ALL the time before I started this project. I would't do it for other women, but I did it on my own self-portraits. Yep, I was a complete hypocrite. But once I took those self-portraits that got me recognition form all over the world of my bigger post-birth body with some epic dark circles under my eyes, my life and my work truly changed. Maybe that is to say, as soon as I stopped being a hypocrite, people started trusting me.

I hear this a lot, "I see everyone except myself as beautiful." While I totally understand this because I too once believed this story, I now know that if I truly see myself as beautiful, the rest of the world becomes epic. Plus, when I hear a woman putting herself down, I cannot help but wonder what she truly thinks of me, because she is so precious! What is my point here? My point is that we must learn to love our preciousness, in it's entirety. We must learn to see un-photoshopped images of ourselves and not cringe but smile at our irreplaceableness! Not only must we love ourselves, we must cherish our selves, wrinkles, cellulite, pimples and all.

How can photography be therapeutic? I think this is a perfect example: Robyn, the beautiful woman in these images, sent me this reflection after our photo shoot: