Sterling’s Strong Woman Photography

Sterling is a photographer near NYC who is working on a series of photos of strong women — whatever that looks like to each individual woman. In this article, she explains her approach:

“As a passionate amateur portraitist I know we all have pretty much no idea what we look like: this is a fact of living our lives, year after year from the inside, instead of making current and objective judgments from a distance. We have these images of ourselves in our minds that are bizarre little golems cobbled together from experience, disappointment, and a metric ton of opinions that just aren’t relevant anymore. Like the drawer in the house that collects souvenir magnets from states visited, packages of birthday candles, and photos too poorly taken to be presented and too miscellaneous to file…

[After working out] I looked less like a novelty pumpkin, but now I looked like I could carry a child out of a burning building, and as helpful a skill as that might be when civilization falls apart, I was lost as to where that fit in the spectrum of desirability. I needed to be told, and the teevee and the glossy magazines were mute on this point. I couldn’t find anyone who looked like me in them. I was in uncharted territory, and all it said at the edge where I’d fallen off the map was “here there be dragons…

Because this has been such an important revelation in my own life, and because of my experience as a portrait photographer, I have started a series for my own passion. I am taking photos to show strong women as beautiful women for people who don’t yet realize that they are the same thing…

If I can help just one other woman give up an old internal image that is making her unhappy, I will have considered myself to have won. If I can show just one woman that she’s pretty enough that Fridays alone are optional, I will be too smug to be endured.

If you know women you think would be interested in working with me on this project who are near, or can get to, New York City, I would love to get in touch. The idea that female beauty is a singular, helpless, and angular ideal and that those of us who don’t conform are not beautiful is wrong and making people unhappy.

It’s time to empty out that drawer.”

If there are any women in the NYC area interested in working with Sterling, send me an email or post in the comments and I’ll make sure she gets it.