Getting professional photos of yourself can be an incredibly intimidating process. With imperfect bodies subject to an exposing flash that magnifies each forehead wrinkle, thigh dimple, and tiger-striped stretch mark, it’s not surprising that many women sink into the comforting mask of the Photoshop “magic wand.”
But this photographer’s story of one client has become a body-image campaign that is piercing straight through the cellulite of women everywhere. What’s most endearing, is that it isn’t inspired by imagery, but words—and the source is not other women, but a man.
One email from a heartbroken husband is officially the ode to love handles every girl needs to hear.
The man’s wife went to Victoria Caroline Haltom, a professional boudoir photographer, to get intimate photos taken of herself as a gift to him. She was in her mid-forties with a voluptuous size-18 figure, and she wanted to give her husband the perfect gift. She wanted to feel pretty, if only for a moment in freeze-framed, picturesque time—so she had a very specific request:
“I want you to photoshop all of my cellulite, all of my angry red stretch marks, ALL of my fat, and all of my wrinkles….just make it go away. I want to feel gorgeous just ONCE,” she told Haltom.
To her surprise, her husband was not impressed; in fact, he was quite disappointed. He looked at these photos, and decided to reach out to the photographer with an email that has changed the way she looks at her line of work for good.
It wasn’t exactly a complaint about her work. He knows Haltom was only doing as instructed, but there’s still something he needed her to know:
“When I opened the album that she gave to me, my heart sank,” he wrote. “These pictures… while they are beautiful and you are clearly a very talented photographer…. they are not my wife.
You made every one of her “flaws” disappear… and while I’m sure this is exactly what she asked you to do, it took away everything that makes up our life. When you took away her stretch marks, you took away the documentation of my children. When you took away her wrinkles, you took away over two decades of our laughter, and our worries. When you took away her cellulite, you took away her love of baking and all the goodies we have eaten over the years.”
He wanted to be clear that he wasn’t mad at Haltom. It wasn’t her fault. In fact, he was thankful for the powerful reminder her photos gave him about what his wife really needed from him as a husband. Perhaps the one person he forgot to tell all this to—was her.