It is rarely about how they look. It is almost always about how they believe they are being seen.
by Jorge Javier Peña
There is a conversation that happens in almost every session, usually within the first few minutes.
Sometimes it starts before we even pick up the camera.
“I’m not very photogenic.”
“I never like how I look in pictures.”
“I always look awkward. Fair warning.”
It arrives as a disclaimer, the way someone might mention a bad knee before a long walk. A preemptive explanation for something they have already decided is simply true about them.
But after years of photographing women, I have come to understand something about that discomfort that most people never examine closely enough:
It is rarely about appearance.
The Disconnect
What most women experience in front of a camera is not a problem with how they look. It is a problem with the distance between the two images of themselves.
The first image is internal. The version they carry in their mind, assembled over years from mirrors, photographs, comments, comparisons, and the accumulated weight of being looked at in a culture that has very specific opinions about how women should appear.
The second image is the one the camera produces. Unfamiliar. Unfiltered. Taken from an angle they did not choose, in a moment they did not control, by someone else’s eye rather than their own.
When those two images do not match, something registers as wrong. Not necessarily ugly. Not necessarily bad. Just wrong. Off. Not quite themselves.
That feeling, that quiet but persistent disconnect, is what most women call not being photogenic.
But the camera did not create the disconnect. It simply made it visible.
What the Camera Actually Reveals
Susan Sontag observed that photographs do not simply record reality. They interpret it. And when the subject of that interpretation is ourselves, the result can feel genuinely disorienting.
We have spent years negotiating our own image through mirrors, selfies, filters, and carefully controlled angles. We have learned which side photographs better, which expression feels safest, which version of ourselves is acceptable for public consumption. That negotiation happens so constantly and so automatically that most people are not even aware they are doing it.
A photograph taken by someone else interrupts all of that.
It bypasses the negotiation entirely and shows something uncontrolled. And in a culture shaped by comparison, by edited images, by the relentless pressure to appear a certain way, an uncontrolled image can feel like an exposure rather than a portrait.
That is the fear underneath the discomfort. Not that the photograph will show something ugly. But that it will show something true.
The Screen That Taught Us to See Ourselves Wrong
Something specific has happened to the way women experience their own image over the last fifteen years, and it is worth naming directly.
Social media did not invent insecurity about appearance. But it industrialized it in a way that has no historical precedent.
Previous generations compared themselves to magazine covers, to film stars, to a relatively limited visual landscape of idealized images. That comparison was damaging enough. But it was also recognizably distant. The magazine model was someone else, somewhere else, professionally lit and professionally retouched, and most people understood that implicitly.
What social media introduced was a comparison that feels personal. The images flooding a feed are not distant celebrities. They are acquaintances, colleagues, women of similar age and similar circumstances who appear to exist in a state of permanent photogenic readiness. Perfect skin. Perfect light. Perfect casual moments that required forty-seven attempts and three different filters to achieve.
The result is a standard that feels simultaneously more attainable and more crushing than any magazine ever managed.
Because if she looks like that in an ordinary Tuesday photograph, why don’t I?
And then the camera appears. And the gap between the curated images absorbed daily and the unfiltered reality of a face in natural light feels not like a technical problem but like a personal failure.
What changes when someone understands this is not that the insecurity disappears. It is that it loses its authority. The standard was never real. The comparison was never fair. And the discomfort in front of the camera was never evidence of a flaw. It was evidence of an impossible standard applied to an ordinary human moment.
Learned to Pose, Never Learned to Be
There is a distinction I return to constantly when working with clients.
Most women have learned how to pose. They know the angles. They know which expressions feel safer. They have developed a repertoire of small adjustments that make photographs feel more manageable, more controlled, more like the version of themselves they have decided is presentable.
What most women have never experienced is simply being in front of a camera without performing for it.
Not posing. Not adjusting. Not managing. Just existing inside the frame while someone else pays attention.
That sounds simple. It is surprisingly rare. And the camera captures the difference between the two instantly and without mercy.
The tension in a posed photograph is not always visible as tension. Sometimes it looks like a perfectly competent portrait. Correct. Controlled. Technically fine. And somehow completely devoid of the person who was standing there.
The photographs that stay, the ones people return to years later, are seldom the most controlled ones. They are the ones where something real crossed the frame before the person had time to manage it back into safety.
What Actually Happens During a Session
The transformation rarely happens the way people expect it to.
Most clients arrive having mentally prepared for the version of themselves they intend to present. They have thought about their hair, their angles, the expression they will use, the version of themselves that feels safe enough for public record. They arrive, in other words, already performing.
The first photographs usually reflect that. There is nothing wrong with them technically. But there is a quality of controlled presentation in them that is immediately recognizable to anyone who has spent enough time behind a camera. The person is there. But not entirely.
What changes is not a single moment of breakthrough. It is an accumulation of small surrenders.
A joke that produces a laugh that was not planned. A moment between setups when the performance drops for a second because there is nothing specific to perform. A shift in conversation that pulls attention away from the camera entirely and toward something that actually matters to the person standing in front of it.
And in one of those moments, something real crosses the frame.
I have learned to watch for it rather than create it. It cannot be manufactured through direction or technique. It can only be recognized when it arrives and captured before it disappears.
When I show that image to the person who was standing there, something happens that is different from the reaction to the posed photographs. There is usually a pause. A second look. And then something shifts in their expression that is completely different from everything they warned me about at the beginning of the session.
They see themselves without the performance. And the version they find there is almost always better than the one they arrived intending to show.
The Mirror and the Portrait
There is a connection worth drawing between this experience and something older than photography entirely.
Long before cameras existed, the question of how we see ourselves versus how we actually exist was already a subject serious enough for artists to dedicate entire bodies of work to exploring it. Rembrandt painted himself more than ninety times across a lifetime. Frida Kahlo used her own face as the primary terrain for investigating identity, pain, and cultural pressure. They were not making vanity portraits. They were asking the same question that every woman asks silently the moment a camera appears:
Is this really who I am?
The selfie answers that question by offering control. You take forty-seven versions and select the one that most closely matches the internal image. The discomfort is managed into submission.
The portrait asks the question differently. It says: let someone else look at you, without the negotiation, without the control, without the forty-seven attempts. Let the camera find something you were not managing for public consumption.
That is why portrait photography, when it works, produces a reaction that selfies rarely do. Not because the portrait is more flattering. But because it is more honest. And honesty, even when it is unexpected, even when it arrives in the form of a photograph of yourself that you did not control, has a way of feeling more like recognition than exposure.
The discomfort women feel in front of a camera is not a barrier to that recognition. It is often the beginning of it.
Because on the other side of the performance, on the other side of the managed angles and the careful expressions and the preemptive apologies about awkwardness, there is usually a person who is considerably more interesting than the version they arrived intending to show.
And that is the photograph worth making.
Not the one where everything was controlled.
The one where, for one unguarded moment, everything was true.
If you read Spanish, you’ll find more of these ideas at Háblame de Fotos.
Photography doesn’t end when the shutter closes. Continue the conversation in The Journal.
Jorge Javier Peña is a fine art and boudoir photographer based in Jacksonville, Florida. He is the founder of Ingravity Art, where he explores portraiture, identity, and the human presence in front of the camera.