Why I don’t like to call my photos boudoir.

If you follow me around for a few days and see how I prepare for and do portrait sessions, you would definitely categorize me as a boudoir photographer. People bring piles of lace and straps overflowing from a bag, they often end up nude, and by the end I have some seriously sexy photos on my camera. But I still don’t like to call it boudoir. Because boudoir feels really quite surface to what unfolds in front of my lens.

Boudoir (which means bedroom in french) often feels like a complete set that one steps into in order to be sexy. Poses are universally similar, lighting on point, and beautiful bums arched over the same little chair. I love a boudoir shoot. I did one in a studio a few years ago and my images are proudly hung right in front of my bed. But what I do STARTS with the subject. I am inspired by their own body, their own spirit, and their own energy. We build sets from there. My sessions are experience focused with the photos being secondary and that tends to unfold organically, mysteriously, and with a lot of movement.

While I feel that people seek out and hire boudoir photographers because they want to get naked, I want people to hire me because they want to be seen. Not just their body in the least amount of clothes (which is totally optional for my sessions) but truly looked at as a piece of art, because they are.

So call me a boudoir photographer, a fine art photographer, a nude photographer that sometimes photographs people with clothes on. . .I don’t really care much. I just want you to feel like your very best, very sexiest, very purest self.

Helen Joy Harrington

WNC fine art woodland boudoir photographer (or whatever)