The irony of calling myself The Confidence Photographer

I’m not actually a particularly confident person.

For much of my life, I have found it far easier to see other people’s strengths than my own.

I can see potential in someone before they can see it themselves.

I notice the warmth in someone’s smile. The kindness in their eyes. Their strength. Their presence. The little spark that makes them them.

But when it comes to seeing those things in myself?

That’s always been much harder.

I’ve questioned myself more than most people probably realise.

Am I good enough?

Is my work good enough?

Am I actually as capable as other people seem to think I am?

Who am I to call myself The Confidence Photographer?

I’ve compared myself to other photographers. I’ve really doubted my own abilities, even at times when some of the people closest to me — family and friends — seemed to have far more belief in me than I had in myself.

So when I talk about confidence, I’m not talking about it from the outside.

I know, deeply, what a lack of confidence feels like.

And it can be utterly crippling.

It can stop perfectly capable people doing things they really want to do.

It can make us question things we actually know how to do.

It can make us dismiss our own strengths while seeing everyone else’s with absolute clarity.

And it can make us wonder whether other people simply have something we don’t.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I understand so instinctively the women who come to me and say:

“I hate having my photograph taken.”

Because very often, what they’re telling me isn’t really about the camera.

It’s about how they see themselves.

And that, I understand.

There’s another part to this story, though.

I seem to have inherited something from my maman that I’ve never quite been able to put into words.

A sort of je ne sais quoi.

An ability to see something in another woman and somehow help her see it too.

My maman had it.

And somewhere along the way, I realised I had it too.

It’s there when I’m talking to someone who doesn’t believe she’s photogenic.

It’s there in the connection we build. In getting to know the woman in front of me, understanding who she is and how she wants to be seen.

Because for me, the photograph comes after the connection.

And then, somewhere during the shoot, she looks at the back of my camera and says:

“Is that really me?”

I love that moment.

Because yes. It is.

I haven’t created that woman.

She was there all along.

I’ve just helped her see herself differently.

And perhaps The Confidence Photographer was born somewhere between those two things:

My deep understanding of what it feels like not to believe in yourself…

…and this slightly inexplicable thing I inherited from my maman that helps me see what is already there in other women.

There’s an irony in that which I’m only really beginning to understand.

I’ve spent years helping other women see things in themselves that they struggle to see, while having exactly the same difficulty when it comes to myself.

I still question myself.

I still doubt my abilities.

I still have moments when I genuinely cannot see in myself what other people seem to see.

So confidence isn’t something I’ve somehow “arrived at”.

I’m not sure confidence is the absence of self-doubt.

Perhaps it’s learning that self-doubt doesn’t always get the final say.

Perhaps it’s doing something even while you’re questioning whether you’re good enough to do it.

And gradually building up a little more evidence that maybe — just maybe — you are.

Which brings me to this photograph.

It was taken on a summer evening.

I’m sitting in a camping chair in the middle of the river, feet in the water, glass of fizz in my hand.

Nothing particularly momentous was happening.

But when I look at this photograph, there is something about the woman in it that I recognise differently now.

I don’t suddenly think she’s brimming with confidence.

She isn’t.

But perhaps she’s beginning to believe a little more in what other people have been telling her for quite a long time.

And maybe that’s why this work means so much to me.

It was never really about teaching women confidence.

It was about helping them see what had been there all along.

Including, eventually…

me.