A Journey Through My Body

I have lived in Canada since I was a little girl.

I married here too.

My story is about two days.

One day, almost out of nowhere, my husband and I decided to book an artistic nude photo shoot with a woman in nearby Edmonton whom we both knew and liked.

There I stood in the middle of the room, almost completely naked, while Irene adjusted something behind the open door.

Almost completely — because there was still one pair of underwear I had to take off.

I could not do it.

I knew I had booked an artistic nude session.

I knew nudity was part of it.

Still, I could not remove that final tiny thong.

I had brought four bras.

And for each one, several perfectly matched pairs of underwear:

thongs, lace, French-cut briefs.

None of them was even on me now.

And I had always thought my body looked best in lingerie.

Still, that last tiny piece of fabric felt impossible to surrender.

My husband had left five minutes earlier because something always happens at the most important moments.

Until then, he had been the person helping me move through the undressing.

Suddenly, I was alone with a stranger and her camera.

My husband was my safety.

And our marriage had just reached the stage where we wanted a child.

That was why I was here.

I wanted to preserve the body I might never have again after pregnancy.

I hoped a few beautiful photographs would help me let go of the things I could not carry with me into the joys of motherhood.

That was also why I deliberately chose a female photographer.

I believed a Woman would understand this better.

I looked at my body like a sculpture.

I held my stomach in.

I had never made peace with it.

I considered my body beautiful only when my abdominal muscles were tight.

There.

Now it looked acceptable.

I gathered my courage and pushed down the underwear.

Now I truly stood naked in the middle of the room.

Embarrassed.

Tense.

Fragile.

With my stomach carefully pulled in.

Irene had placed two or three lights in the middle of the large studio.

I stepped between them.

“Close your eyes,” she said.

“And touch your body with love anywhere you want.”

Embarrassed, I obeyed.

I moved slowly from top to bottom.

Carefully touching every small surface of skin.

When I reached my breasts, a gentle warmth moved through me.

I began letting go.

The outside world disappeared.

Irene clicked the shutter discreetly and allowed me to move in whatever way felt good.

Soon I no longer felt that there were two people in the room.

Behind the bright lamps, she had almost stopped existing for me.

I entered a place that the shy little girl still hiding behind a thong ten minutes earlier would never have dared imagine.

Then the journey ended.

I became uncertain and anxious again.

The artist continued creating.

And she kept talking to me.

With every sentence, I could feel myself becoming calmer.

“Be yourself. You told me that’s what you wanted.”

I sat facing her, straddling the seat.

Only the back of a bar stool separated us.

She arranged the light so my pubic area remained in shadow.

Slowly, I stepped across the boundary of my own modesty.

Hidden by that darkness, I continued touching myself.

She noticed none of it.

Her attention was on my face.

I was removing my inhibitions in front of a stranger.

The room filled with sexuality.

With long-suppressed energy finally breaking free.

I relaxed.

I stopped caring about what was happening around me.

“I have the perfect photograph.

That pose is finished.

Let’s move on,” she said.

The sentence pulled me out of the experience.

I became ashamed again.

Anxiety returned.

There was an old rustic sofa in another room.

I asked if we could make photographs while I lay there because perhaps I could relax again.

I closed my eyes.

For the third time, I touched myself intimately.

It felt even better than before.

I simply travelled on the roller coaster of pleasure.

My inhibitions disappeared completely.

The rising pleasure gave me strength.

I relaxed again.

But only up to one particular point.

I could not move beyond it.

She noticed.

Then, in a quiet voice, she told me to imagine a place where I could be completely free and completely myself.

I closed my eyes.

And began to fly.

Who am I trying to satisfy?

Why am I ashamed?

When will I finally begin to live?

These questions thundered inside my head.

My thoughts spun so quickly.

I sank so deeply into myself that I could feel every part of my body filling with energy.

More.

And more.

I told her I was ready.

She said something else.

But I remember only one word:

Dissatisfaction.

Suddenly, it felt as though a dam broke open inside me.

I became angry with my husband.

The love of my life.

Angry because he had so little sexual desire.

Because beside him I experienced rejection so often.

Because even with sexy lingerie and a flat stomach, I had succeeded in seducing him so rarely.

Until then, I had treated that reality with empathy and acceptance.

Now, for the first time, I demanded something for myself.

My body wanted sex with almost frightening intensity.

I could feel tingling excitement.

Burning energy.

Irene continued taking photographs discreetly.

It did not bother me at all.

Outside, it was a pleasant autumn day.

Through the studio windows, the noise of the city filtered in.

When I opened my eyes, my first thought was how intensely real everything seemed.

The black metal frames of the lights.

The worn eighteenth-century pattern on the sofa.

The bright orange cushions.

The beam of light entering through the windows.

I had finally arrived inside myself.

And I was ashamed of nothing.

A little later, Irene handed me the photographs so I could choose my favourites.

I saw a beautiful woman.

Every part of her body was beautiful.

Tight.

Muscular.

Slim.

The spots I had considered a tragedy only the day before and the small marks on my skin carrying years of history had suddenly become part of this beautiful body.

My body.

The joy of recognising myself was impossible to describe.

I accused Irene of retouching the photographs despite my request.

She looked at me in genuine surprise.

“When would I have done that? I just took the memory card out of the camera.”

My eyes widened.

These photographs were coming straight from the camera.

And they were so beautiful that I wanted to hang them on the wall immediately.

Irene had been photographing people for nearly ten years.

Perhaps that experience explained the quality of her acceptance.

By then, I no longer saw her as “a woman” standing in front of me.

I saw a kind, smiling young person who performed her work with care and attention.

One photograph was especially important.

My stomach was illuminated above my femininity.

My stomach.

Not held in.

Naturally round.

Beautiful.

I began crying.

The image moved me deeply.

Motherhood and femininity belong together.

That was why I had come.

That was the picture I wanted her to make.

At the end of the session, my husband was present again.

Together, we admired the images.

Still, something Irene had said had opened a door inside me.

The following morning, I had a business meeting with a man who, when I was younger, had given me some of the most intense experiences of desire I had ever known.

He had continued wanting me throughout the years.

For almost a decade — since meeting my husband — I had never returned that desire.

This time, however, the moment I saw him, every part of me filled with electricity.

Energy.

Desire.

Hunger.

For the first time in ten years, I did not resist the feeling.

I let desire carry me.

We kissed with a heat that felt as though we had been preparing for it for a decade.

The release was overwhelming.

Afterwards, my body settled into a deep, pleasant quiet.

I had arrived.

For the first time in a very long time, I felt that the person smiling back at me from the mirror was really me.

The mature woman who no longer tries to satisfy everybody else.

The woman who no longer waits for red marks of approval at the end of every task and every phase of life.

The entire photo session felt like a journey through my body.

I was the passenger.

Irene was the driver.

I boarded the train at a familiar station.

Under her gentle, permissive guidance, the train moved farther and farther away from familiar territory.

A new world opened through each window.

And with it, another view of the Woman I had always suspected lived somewhere inside me but had only now truly met.

If the journey had ended there, I would already have been grateful.

But Irene carried me farther.

Constantly supportive.

Never making the situation awkward.

She helped me cross my own borders.

My inhibitions.

And even some of the difficult inner ground on the road toward motherhood.

She simply photographed the full electric journey of desire that moved through me that day.

The beautiful photographs were only part of what I received.

The greater gift was meeting the elemental femininity living inside me.

And perhaps that is exactly why life is worth living courageously:

For joy.

For deeply experienced moments filled with desire.

For those honest encounters with ourselves.

That is the elemental joy of life I cannot wait to pass on to my future child.

For the first time in my life, I genuinely feel ready for motherhood.

I owe that recognition partly to photography.

And to the person who has probably already given many women and families in our city similarly open, honest moments of joy.

Several days later, as I write these lines, I still feel extraordinary inside my own skin.

I am full of energy.

Sexuality.

The small problems of life slide off me.

I do not think I have ever felt my own inner road, my desires and my direction this clearly.

And I love my husband more than ever.

At last I can accept his own level of desire exactly as it is.

And I can also acknowledge and live my own needs in the form available to me.

I am no longer interested in the expectations other people would place on me.

My inner strength is guiding me now.

I no longer want to mourn what I may lose.

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Motherhood, for me, is about giving myself.

My experiences.

My strength.

My joy.

And as much support as possible for the difficulties of life.

Giving all of that to the child who has not yet even been conceived, but whom I am already preparing to welcome.

Art photography is a sensitive creative process in which body, personality and authentic self all have space to emerge.

Part of the BANHALMI ecosystem

For the professional context and practical side of portrait photography, visit the BANHALMI professional website. Related art series, books and exhibitions are preserved in the BANHALMI ART archive.