A friend contacted me a while back about some family pictures. A mother of two children, a boy and a girl, she wanted to get some photos of the two together, as well as some with herself and her husband. We scheduled a time and ended up taking some beautiful family photos in the Burbank Mountains. After the shoot, my friend asked if she could schedule another session, just for her daughter.
Her daughter was born with a hemangioma, a bright red birthmark that overlapped with her lip. A common and harmless mark, it soon faded enough so that it is barely visible. But, as will often happen with kids on the playground, a school friend asked my friend’s daughter about it, triggering a certain amount of self-consciousness and an awareness of societally imposed markers of “beauty.” Filtered through the mind of a child, these anxieties came out as a version of “Mommy, am I pretty?”
I have had the honor and privilege of spending time with this child and her family. I have seen her strength of character, her joie de vivre, and her ability to move seamlessly through “princess play” into a reenactment of a WWI foxhole battle with her brother. She is a beautiful soul, full of life and love and a kind of strong will that will serve her well as an adult, even if these days it can frustrate her parents at bedtime.
And as for the external markers of beauty, I can say with full confidence, the girl is strikingly beautiful. Birthmark and all.
Although this girl was happy to wear the dress and the bow for the family pictures, and she totally rocked the “sweet little girl” look, I agreed with her mother that this version did not capture all sides of her child.
And so we gave her daughter a photo session where she could be loud, where she could get in the dirt, where she could climb as high as she wanted, and where she only had to smile if she wanted to.
It is one of my favorite shoots to date. I got to capture a girl, a young woman, being comfortable in her own skin and feeling “pretty,” no bows or twirly dresses required.
