I have been doing a lot of portrait/head shot work recently. While every session is different, a common theme for my clients is nearly always around disdain for their appearance. This pains me – that we all collectively feel that we are not measuring up to some silent standard.

Enter Sonya Suares, who bucked my assumption that she, too, was self conscious about her body. She is an actress/director here in Melbourne. Yes, you can see how incredibly beautiful she is from the images below. She is stunning and incredibly photogenic. But she is different because she accepts and loves her body for its *purpose* and not its appearance. And I’m sure you are thinking ‘easy for her’. But, it’s surprising how she came to feel this way. This is her story, in her words…

“The variety of ways in which women internalise/ experience body-loathing is something that staggers and offends me. Weirdly, it’s not something I have personal experience of – I’m not entirely sure how I dodged that bullet.

It’s not that I felt entirely comfortable in my own skin as a child or teenager: I have chronic/ severe eczema, which quite literally made that impossible. In fact, it was probably an inverse logic of feeling excluded by beauty tropes and myths. Early on I decided – and had lots of third party confirmation – that I was not remotely physically attractive. There was even a classroom chorus reinforcing the point when my Year 8 French teacher made the kindly but ultimately misguided decision to draw attention to me as “belle”. So I sort of rolled with ugliness as a given circumstance, somehow didn’t attach a lot of value to looks (beyond feeling it was a bit of a shame that the chaps I fancied were impervious to my charms) and focused my energies elsewhere.

Of late, this reaction, which was not at all an intentional strategy, seems somewhat of a minor miracle. I am enraged at the consistent message that women’s bodies are ornaments rather than vehicles and that their first priority at all times should be how they present themselves for public consumption. I’ll be damned if I don’t dedicate the next 20 odd years to making sure my daughter doesn’t inadvertently absorb the ‘drip, drip, drip’ of this toxic message. I have limbs that work and every day my body carries me through my life, doing all the things I ask of it. It does its best with dance routines, speeds me to the trains I’m perpetually running late for and has twice delivered us beautiful, healthy children complete with their own idiosyncratic little bodies. I’m so grateful for my quirky and imperfect vehicle and the life it makes possible for me.”

Sonya wanted her portrait to portray her experience and intelligence. Not just a pretty face. I could have shown you many other images from our session that show her pretty face, but I will share just the ones she chose, because she knows herself. She is sassy, smart, assertive. And she just so happens to have a beautiful face, too.