Feeling Unedited

The prompt for this week’s Sinful Sunday is “Unedited”. I didn’t expect a prompt to cause me to feel all sorts of uncomfortable emotions, but it sure did. I think I have come to see my pictures and my photography as an artform, in opposition to the sort of nudes I used to send to partners. I love being able to edit pictures, to use different lightening, to us filters. I can only do so much to create a certain atmosphere with a setting and light. So when I read the prompt, I was kind of pushed back into the old mindset: how can I look the best without actually showing the bad parts of me?

Because I couldn’t edit away tired eyes, nor could I shift the focus of the picture away from the parts of my body that I dislike the most. I felt like stuck in old thoughts and patterns of body hatred and body disgust. I pushed through though. I tried many different settings, took hundreds of pictures. Pushed through. I met a skunk in the dark and decided that taking nightly pictures in the dark with a flash was too dangerous of an endeavor.

So I went with something that is very close to the sort of nudes I used to take. It doesn’t really represent where I stand with my photography and for a lack of a better word, modelling, at the moment. But I can stand behind this picture because it seems to represent the transition period that I am in right now: I still hold on to old ideas of negative body image, while I am starting to see that my body doesn’t necessarily need to be beautiful in the conventional sense, to be be part of a creative process.