A week on Sunday I was in Liverpool. And whilst it might have included a fabulous Sunday roast, it wasn’t really why we were there.
Charley and I made our way to Liverpool to join over 20 other women, for a photo shoot. One that represented women of different shapes, sizes, abilities, sexualities, situations, cis/trans, skin tones, ages. We are all on different journeys in both our lives, and in our bodies. Some are learning to accept theirs, some to love theirs, others already deep into the journey of self acceptance, and love.
The idea was from Emilie Shoots. She wanted to gather a group of women, for a body positive shoot. No stranger to these, I jumped at the chance, and invited my friend Charley to join in. The atmosphere was supportive. Almost everyone began a little nervous and unsure, but as time went on, make up was done, hair primped, nerves settled, encouragement grew and clothes came off.
As many of you will know, body positive style shoots are not a new thing for me. Since I first discovered just how empowering it could be to stand in front of a camera, and just be, I’ve loved it. It gives you new eyes to see yourself. A different perspective to look at yourself and your body – your body as a whole, as opposed to the little bits you don’t like, the jiggly bits and lumpy bits.
And I’ve no doubt that the ladies that took part feel the same. We see ourselves in depth, in detail, whilst others don’t just see our physicality. They see our personality, our kindness, our attitude, the light in our eyes.
You’ll be able to see their own blog posts about their experiences over the next few weeks (I’ll add links to this post as we go), but to see all the images, pop over to Instagram to We Are Women Liverpool.
In a world where we’re fighting for representation, and where brands like Simply Be promise new icons and don’t deliver (more on that in tomorrow’s post), maybe we need to do more for ourselves. Stop looking for them in the media, and just be each others icons.
