I spent the morning in Bath pretending to be a fashion model.
Of course I’m not one. What was actually going on is that I have discovered that I need a professionally done head shot for publicity purposes. This is what happens when you do radio, public speaking and so on. Doing this is beyond scary, because cameras hate me. I have a couple of pictures that I can just about tolerate, but mostly seeing photos of me makes me want to curl up and die. (Please remember this, especially if you are about to post photos of me to Facebook.)
Thankfully I happen to know a very good photographer who lives nearby. Joe Abercrombie’s wife, Lou, has done publicity shots for many of my author friends, including Paul Cornell, Gareth Powell, Emma Newman and Sarah Pinborough; not to mention Joe himself, of course. I really like her work, so I arranged to go and get snapped.
I found the process of being photographed both fun and educational. As long as I could forget the fact that there will be actual photographs at the end of the process I could just enjoy the process and learn how to pose for a camera. It isn’t easy to do well, and I have a great deal of respect for professional models who manage to look happy and sexy to order for hours on end. Striking a pose is also a skill that I probably don’t have, but enjoyed trying to learn.
Eventually I will have to choose a picture or two to use, and I’ll put them up here for you to laugh at. Please don’t judge Lou’s work by this. Check out her website instead. She’s really great at putting her subjects at ease too.
As a physicist and photographer, my theory is that we see ourselves mainly in a mirror — that photographs of us always don’t look right because they’re backwards and human faces are not bilaterally symmetric. If you flip a picture R to L, it may look more like you. (grin)
Dr. Phil
I have had similar thoughts myself. Doesn’t always work, though.
I don’t know why it is, but I have wondered if it is to with our self image involving more things that aren’t physical, like personality traits, than thing that are physical like the shape of our upper lip. Which in my case I hate, I was appalled to discover my profile was just like one of my brothers. We dont spend all our time looking in mirrors, but we do spend all of our time with our personality so we know that aspect of ourselves far better than our physical selves.
That’s undoubtedly part if it, but there are also socially accepted standards of beauty, and I know I don’t fit them. Heck, I had people telling me I was ugly when I was still having to pretend to be male. Transition can’t fix that, especially if you can’t afford FFS.
That is certainly true, but it goes beyond that don’t you think? Even while part of us knows exactly what we look like, conventionally beautiful or not, somehow another part of us doesnt believe that we really look like THAT! I am speaking as someone born female so I don’t have the transition complication and am not presuming to make any comment on that aspect, just on the experience that so many people of every gender seem to have when they look at photographs of themselves.
Dunno, I think it is more a case of not wanting to be reminded what we look like. We are bombarded with images of what we *should* look like, and are inevitably disappointed when what we see of ourselves doesn’t match up to that.
Mmmm I should probably have put ‘born female and always identifying as female’ above.