The Body That Refuses to Apologise

I have watched an industry spend enormous resources trying to convince women that a body has a shelf life on it — a window, usually laughably short, during which it is permitted to be photographed without qualification, before and after which it requires justification, softening, an implicit apology built into the lighting. I no longer believe this window exists. I think it was invented, and maintained, by people who had a great deal to sell to anyone frightened enough to believe in it.

What I have actually observed, across every age of woman I have ever cast or stood in front of a lens myself, is that a body does not lose beauty with time. It loses the specific, narrow beauty that only ever belonged to unformed youth in the first place — a beauty defined largely by potential, by not yet having become anything in particular — and it replaces it with something photography has always been better at capturing anyway: evidence. A line at the corner of an eye is not a flaw the light must be arranged around. It is a record, visible proof that this particular face has laughed enough times, in enough true joy, to be marked by it permanently. That is not a loss. It is closer to a signature.

I photograph differently now than I did a decade ago, and it is not technique that changed. It is what I am willing to consider worth photographing. I used to light to erase. I now light to reveal, because I have come to think that a face that has been lived in has more to say to a camera than one still waiting to find out what it will become. The women I have worked with who understand this — who stop bracing for the apology the industry taught them to offer before anyone even asks for one — are, without exception, the ones who produce the images that outlast every trend the season was built around.

I do not say any of this as comfort, and I dislike the word "empowering," which has been worn smooth by overuse until it means almost nothing. I say it because it is, simply, technically true: a camera does not require youth to make a good photograph. It requires a body that has stopped negotiating for permission to be seen exactly as it currently is. That refusal — quiet, unargued, absolute — is, I have come to believe, the most photogenic thing a person can bring into a room, at any age at all, and it is available, starting today, to every single person who decides to stop apologising for the specific decade their face happens to be telling the truth about.

— Anna

A finding from consumer research that surprised even me the first time I read it: in a controlled study, women aged 60 to 80 rated older-looking fashion models as more attractive than younger ones, and were more likely to want to buy what those older models wore (Kozar & Damhorst, 2008). The industry has simply been slow to notice what its own actual audience already knows.