What is Boudoir Photography? From Sexuality to a Full Self-Love Experience

Boudoir Photography, Empowerment, Self Discovery, Self Love, Wellness

Historically, boudoir photography is a sensual portrait experience that empowers women. Still, I want to stretch boudoir photography out of its capitalist box, its niche, and let it become making art with women expressing their lived experiences, their whole selves, wild and untamed, being uniquely who they are.

Hello beautiful, my name is Lumalia Armstrong, and I’m a beauty hunter, a poet, author, innovator, disrupter, trouble maker, healer, mama, boudoir photographer, self-love advocate, romantic, and too many other names I could spend hours telling you about. I first came across boudoir photography and honestly hated it. I didn’t like that women were overtly and willingly sexualizing themselves and calling it powerful. Until I got naked in front of my own camera for the first time as a photographer, looking for ways I felt beautiful (the full story of that is in my memoir Blooming Upside Down and the story ‘Cover Girl’).

Spoiler alert: it was nude.

I felt beautiful when I took off all the make up, all the clothes and was just me on my bed moving. So I wrestled until I realized I loved boudoir photography in theory.

Still, I knew I needed to recreate the experience to pull it away from our current world of treating everything as a commodity.

I need to reclaim the essence of the art that defines the beautiful work of deep witnessing. This I’ve always known is the gift all photographers participate in, someone who sees the fullness of you, you didn’t notice before.

So, where did Boudoir photography come from? Boudoir photography comes from the French word Boudoir, which means bedroom. In original French, it came from the word meaning to pout but ultimately became used in English as a private room. Boudoir Photography has a fascinating history in that it began with photographers in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Where men photographed women in erotic portraiture. However, nudity in art isn’t anything new, especially when you look at the frescos preserved from Pompeii in 79 AD and even the erotic Turin Papyrus from Egypt in 1150 B.C. It’s safe to say humans have been expressing their sexuality in art throughout time.

However, Boudoir Photography nowadays has become a movement of humans reclaiming the right to their sexuality, self-confidence, and sensual expressions, often as an act of celebrating their body, a gift for a partner, or in a bridal boudoir experience for someone before their wedding.

But what is boudoir photography? When we get down to the psychology of it, when we get to the root of why humans are flocking to this experience, and what can it continue to be as we evolve out of the male gaze, out of the patriarchy, out of capitalism, and that is what I’m here to explore with you.

What’s the History of Boudoir Photography?

When digging for boudoir photography, you first find the erotic photography of male artists like Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Jean Agélou of the 1900 century. Having women pose nude in various places, nature, and sets designs. These photographs are fascinating to inspect because, in them, you see women who very much look like they are put into a shape, almost like statues; there isn’t life in them, there isn’t sensuality in them except they are nude. It still feels very innocent in some ways, like the women are ok with being nude. However, they still seem shy and like they aren’t quiet in their bodies.

Then you stumble upon photography after the world wars when Esquire commissioned Alberto Vargas to create the Pin Up Girls to encourage young men to sign up for the war. This series of photographs, known as the Vargas Girls, created champaigns for young me to hear things like “She’s worth fighting for” or “Come home to your girl a hero.” This work was also featured in Life Magazine and was also the time of an easy sell for most men, I can only imagine. Men often had these photos with them during the war to keep morale up.

Interestingly enough, women were also prompted by the iconic “We Can Do It!” poster by J. Howard Miller which has an interestingly similar feel. But this time, the woman is fully clothed has a red bandana and jeans-like colored jumper, with her arm is flexed and her sleeve pulled up to show her “muscles.” While this image wasn’t erotic by any means, the style is the same, using an image to promote morals, the art of the female form to evoke a message.

Then, there is Madonna, the pioneer of sexuality in our modern age. One of the first artists to push the boundaries with her erotic dancing on stage during the 1984 MTV Video Awards when she sang “Like A Virgin” in a wedding dress. She lost her stiletto, got on the floor, and danced as she came down from her cake. The videographer zooms in on her ass as she humps the floor. As she gets backstage, her manager says he quits and asks why she did this. She replies, “Because a woman can be sexual, a woman can have pleasure.” Talk about empowering.

Then, eight years later, Madonna published her Sex Coffee Table Book with her album Erotica, which was on the New York Times best-seller list for three weeks. Madonna was the pioneer of our modern age that let women finally be celebrated in photographs for being sexual.

Modern photographers began to pick up boudoir at first as a way to help women feel celebrated in their bodies, reclaim their sexuality, and document different seasons in their lives. However, to me, it came with interesting modalities and methods that still felt off.

What is Boudoir Photography now?

Boudoir photography is now an act of rebellion that says my body is my own, and my life experiences, including my sexuality, get to be mine, and I’m the one who chooses how to express it. Boudoir photography now gets to be a moment of stepping deeper into our bodies, mainly as femmes, and being celebrated for our sexuality.

But here is where I want to stretch the capacity of boudoir photography as an artist, as an innovator, as a beauty hunter: here is where I believe boudoir photography needs to move beyond a woman in her power is a sexual woman, but let boudoir photography become a woman in her power is a woman integrating all of her vast diversity of being a creator.

You see, boudoir photography puts a woman in a moment of her expression. Women often leave this session feeling confident and empowered, but only because they were coached into sensual poses, told how to look, make certain faces, and hold a very uncomfortable shape they may have never made before.

It’s here I push back against this work as it adds to women believing to be powerful, we have to put into shapes we don’t know how to embody ourselves, and this is dangerous psychological programming for women especially, in my opinion. In these sessions women are dressed in sexy lingerie they may haven’t even worn before. They are put into hotel rooms and bedrooms-like sets, which, to my psychology, feels a bit too close to that of a sex worker; I greatly honor these women stepping into divine sexuality and sacredness, but this is not the only power of a woman.

So I ask what happens to the woman in her sweat pants covered in milk from her child running feral through the house when she stays up late, making her dreams come true, and steps out in nature barefoot, remembering she belongs here, too.

Does this women get to feel and be empowered in her “mess”? Where are we celebrating and creating art with this verisoin of the woman and not just the Pin Up Vargas girls made to temporarily cheer up moral?

And does she only get to be celebrated as a mother?

It seems we commoditized women’s empowerment and packaged it up to a one-hour experience when I know firsthand that getting naked and being posed like prize cattle does not suddenly shift humans into a new paradigm of empowerment. It can help, don’t get me wrong, it’s a step. But for me, it’s too slow and has too many weighted anchors of the patriarchy still bobbing at an old bay. I want these empowerment experiences to stretch our sails, shift the way we show up in the world, and let us visit the whole world of our lives, not just our bedrooms.

Yet, in our current boudoir photography experiences, empowerment will show up for those moments you look at those photographs. Still, it doesn’t change the dialogue in your head; it doesn’t change how you say no and hold your boundaries; it doesn’t stop the programmed people-pleasing or being the polite woman who makes everyone feel safe in their bodies because they don’t know how to feel safe unless you hold their trauma in your body giving them hugs when you want to say no, but don’t know how how to. (i dive deep into this subject in my program Blooming Wild)

We, as women empowered, need more than being assertive in our sexuality. We need more than just being coached into shapes, told to wear certain clothes, and trying on a character we see in someone’s boudoir photography portfolio. No, I think women need more than just an hour of experience to step into their power.

So, I want to stretch us into remember that we are more than the sum of our parts.

What if Boudoir Photography Became Self-love Photoshoots

Modern society loves to take everything apart, dissect it, examine it, and ask what life once held when life was no longer in it. We’ve done this with our bodies, we’ve done this with biology, we’ve done this with art, we’ve done this with our psychics. What are the parts, and how do they make up the whole? Yes, we’ve found wonderful things, but more importantly, we forgot the whole because we were determined to pull it all to pieces. It’s as if we are staring at a puzzle and asking what picture it makes, except our puzzle is a moving, living, self-creating being that never makes just one picture. We make art, sing, and create. A part alone can never explain how we do this.

When I get into working with artists, women stepping into their power, healing the people pleasing, healing the generational trauma, healing the victim mindsets, stepping into abundance, the thing that I always find true even in myself is this strong edge of declaring we are not just one thing. So many powerful women and powerful humans have been known because they were good at one thing. Take, for example, the actor who is in one show and becomes that character for you forever. Sabrina Carpenter was that for me. I forever saw her as the supporting actress in Girl Meets World. The show my daughter and I watched together because Boy Meets World was one of my favorites growing up. We loved it. Yet nearly eight years later, when my stepdaughters watched a dance movie, they pointed out she was Sabrina Carpenter, now the popular singer they always put on. My brain created a new space for this woman; she became something new to me, but she’s always been this diverse of a person, despite my categorization of her in my head.

This is the greatest gift we can do for all we love, including ourselves, and it’s why in any self-love journey, we must remember not to contain ourselves to just one role, one category, one part.

We sometimes get stuck in one emotional experience, one thought, one moment in time and forget we are not a part; we are not just one limb, we are a significantly evolved piece of this earth, we are life itself, we hold the ability to create things from mere ideas, to take the intangible and make it come to be in our hands, whether it is in art, words, friendships, birthing humans, businesses, movements that change our world, meals that bring us bliss, songs that tell the stories of our hearts diverse landscapes. We are not parts; we are co-creators.

So when I get to work with people on their self-love journey in somatic work, in embodiment work, in returning to a deep affection for all of them, their wholeness, and in self-love photography sessions especially, we play with all the aspects but most importantly someone’s wholeness.

We play with the woman who is declaring she is a pile of feelings who can be sad in one moment and then in joy the next moment.

We play with the woman who pushes against all the ways she was told her body needed covering, wrapped up, and told it could make others sin because she has breasts. She said that when her breasts giggle when she gets on stage dancing her heart out, she’s responsible for other’s feelings. So, in an act of rebellion, she dances nude on the beach and declares that this flesh is holy.

We play with the woman who has deep desires and can pull them into her body and breathe out her creations: the poet, the artist, the actress, the siren.

We play with the woman who loves flowers, wants to adore herself with them, and embodies every ounce of their symbolism from resilient, fierce protector to gentle and soft Venus being born.

We play with the rebirthing in the spring when new chapters of our lives come to life after so many seasons of wintering, wintering, and discovering that our bodies are wise.

We play with the heartbreak we are feeling, letting ourselves unravel at the ways we keep loving those who are too broken to remember to love themselves. We give too much until one day we decide it’s enough, go lay ourselves in a bed of flowers, and remember our lives are the only ones we can save, not his.

We play with all that makes her story and tell it because it’s time we remember we are not just mothers, daughters, and servants to each other, we are whom we decide we get to be, and that is the greatest act of self-love we can ever give ourselves.

So, what is boudoir photography now? Let’s make boudoir photography, more of a self love photography, a whole journey, let boudoir photography a moment to try on new characters of ourselves, to let out what’s inside of us, the unnamable, to be feral one moment, sensual the next, and tear-stained another. Let’s not let ourselves be just a powerful woman with pleasure pouring out of her expressions but a powerful woman weeping, a powerful woman raging, a powerful woman remembering she is powerful simply because she exists.

This is the type of boudoir photography and well self-love experience I create with my clients. Yes, you can bring your sexy lingerie too but know I’m here to get to know all of you and help you remember Your Body is Poetry, just like all of you.

You are a walking oracle, and I cannot wait to meet you.

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