Written in 2014.
My mom passed away about three years ago. One of the things I realised quickly, going through family photos, was that there were very few pictures of her anywhere.
Of the few I had, many showed her sticking her tongue out at the camera, or making a rude gesture at whoever was behind it. She didn’t like having her picture taken. She was, in reality, a beautiful person. As her child, whether she was beautiful didn’t matter to me. Just that she was my mom. To me, she was everything.
As the years crept on, I realised that I too was refusing to have my picture taken. Primarily because of my weight, and because I don’t much like the way I look. My hair is frizzy and curly and it just… is my hair.
That meant that for several years there were very few pictures of me either, because I was always careful to be the one holding the camera so nobody would notice. And I realised that would leave my children with a legacy of no pictures of their mother, or with their mother.
I also realised I had no professional headshots — nothing I could use for any professional application at all.
That’s when I decided to get over myself and start having pictures taken.
What changed
In the past three years or so I’ve had professional headshots done, and I’ve made a point of having family portraits taken. I’m in those portraits. My hair is still its usual crazy self. And I’m still overweight.
But I stopped letting that keep me out of the picture. I started posing. I started taking the occasional selfie. Nobody made fun of me. It turns out I look in photographs exactly the way I look in real life. Love it or hate it, it still is.
It also sends a powerful message, particularly to my daughters, that I’m okay with how I look and that they should be okay with how they look.
That’s something all of us as adult women should do — accept ourselves as we are. Even if you want to change something, still get the photos taken. Actions speak louder than words. If we tell our daughters to cherish themselves as they are, we need to do the same for ourselves.
The professional half of this, which I mentioned and didn’t pursue
There’s a line in the middle of that I skipped past at the time, and it turns out to matter enormously: I had no usable professional photograph of myself.
That’s not a vanity problem. It’s a business one.
A business owner with no decent photograph is invisible in every context that matters. You can’t be put forward as a speaker. A journalist writing about your industry moves on to someone whose picture they can run. Your own website has a team page with a gap on it, or a stock image of a woman who isn’t you. Every introduction someone makes on your behalf arrives without a face attached.
And people buy from people, particularly in small businesses. The photograph isn’t decoration on the credibility — a good part of the time, it is the credibility.
So the same avoidance that kept me out of family albums was also, quietly, keeping me out of rooms.
Why owners disappear from their own businesses
This is worth naming because it’s common and it rarely gets called what it is.
Plenty of capable people run businesses while doing everything possible to stay out of view. No photograph. No byline. No video. Nothing on LinkedIn beyond a job title. They will tell you, honestly, that they’d rather the work spoke for itself.
The work does not speak for itself. It has no mouth.
What actually happens is that someone else — often less good at the job — becomes the recognisable name in your market, because they were willing to be seen and you weren’t. That isn’t a comment on ability. It’s a comment on who showed up in the photograph.
And the reasons for staying out of shot are almost never about business. They’re about weight, or age, or hair, or a voice you don’t like hearing recorded. Perfectly human, and an expensive thing to let decide your professional visibility.
What to actually do
- Book the headshots. This month. Not after you’ve lost weight, sorted your hair out, or reached whatever version of yourself you’re waiting for. That version keeps moving.
- Get more than one look. Formal, informal, one where you’re laughing. You’ll need different things for different contexts, and a single stiff portrait ages badly.
- Get in the family pictures too. Hand someone the camera. This is the part your children will actually have.
- Use them. Website, profiles, speaker submissions, article bylines. A photograph sitting in a folder does the same amount of good as no photograph.
- Redo them every couple of years. Not vanity — a photo that clearly isn’t current undermines the trust it was meant to build.
The thing I’d say now
Being seen is not the same as being admired, and I think I conflated the two for years.
Nobody looking at your headshot is assessing whether you’re attractive. They’re working out whether you look like someone who could help them. Those are completely different judgements, and the second one has almost nothing to do with the things that keep people out of photographs.
A note added later: I did eventually lose the weight — over 210 pounds across the following seven years. But I want to be clear that it isn’t the point of this post, and I’m glad I didn’t wait. Every photograph from those years exists because I stopped making being seen conditional on being finished. If I had waited, my children would have a gap in the album covering most of their childhood, and it would never have been worth it.
