You Are Not Unphotogenic

I have a confession. I hear the same sentence in the first five minutes of almost every session.

“I am not photogenic.”

Sometimes it is “I hate having my picture taken.” Sometimes it is a joke about breaking the camera. It is said lightly. It is almost never meant lightly.

Here is what is actually happening, and it has very little to do with your face.

You have never seen your face the way other people see it. The face you know is the one in the mirror, and it is reversed. Every day of your life you have looked at a flipped version of yourself. Then a camera shows you the version everyone else has been looking at all along, and something reads as wrong. Not ugly. Wrong. Unfamiliar.

That is not a flaw in your face. That is a flaw in the mirror.

Most of the images you have of yourself were not made with any care. A phone held under your chin. A group shot where you were mid-sentence. Fluorescent light in a conference room. Someone counting to three while you held a smile past the point where it meant anything.

You have a lifetime of evidence, and almost none of it was collected fairly.

A held smile is not a real one. The muscles that make a genuine expression are not the ones you can hold on command. Everybody knows what the held version looks like. It is why so many people believe they photograph badly. They have only ever seen themselves holding it.

Getting past that is a skill, and it is mine, not yours. That is what expression coaching is. Guiding someone to the expression that is already theirs instead of the one they think they are supposed to perform.

What I see happen, over and over. Someone walks in certain they are the difficult case. We take our time. No timer, no counting down. At some point the guard comes down, usually without them noticing, and they let themselves be photographed instead of bracing against it.

The images that come out of that moment are stunning. Every time. Not because of anything I did with the camera. Because they finally let themselves show up.

Then they look at the back of the camera and go quiet.

A great headshot does not fix you. It shows what you actually look like. Which, for most people, is considerably better than the version they have been carrying around.

You are not unphotogenic. You have just never been photographed by anyone who had the time.