There’s a word I hear all the time and always with a “not” in front of it and it’s “I’m not photogenic”.
I hear it on the phone before we’ve even booked, then again at the studio. It’s become the default opening line, one I got used to hearing, but it also made me stop and think.
I’ve been thinking and writing a lot lately about how we see ourselves in photos, from Why we hate photos of ourselves to Why we take selfies. At the end of the first one, I said we should probably retire the word “photogenic” altogether. I meant it. But before we let it go, it’s worth knowing where it came from, because what does photogenic mean turns out to have a far better answer than the one most of us have been carrying around.
What does photogenic mean?
In the 1830s, an English scientist called William Henry Fox Talbot was laying leaves and pieces of lace directly onto paper coated with light-sensitive chemicals, then leaving them out in the sun. The light darkened the paper all around each object, leaving a pale, delicate silhouette behind. In 1839 he presented them to the Royal Society, and he called them “photogenic drawings”.
Photo, from the Greek for light. Genic, meaning produced by. Just as photography means drawing with light, photogenic literally means “produced or caused by light”. For nearly a century it stayed a technical word, used by scientists for things that make their own light, like fireflies or glowing bacteria.
Nothing in that definition hinted at a face or a person at all. It’s about light, and what light leaves behind when it touches something.
William Henry Fox Talbot, photogenic drawing from the Album di disegni fotogenici. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.
How a word about light became a word about faces
Then came cinema. Around 1920, French film critics like Louis Delluc were writing about photogénie, the strange way the camera seemed to reveal something in a person that you didn’t quite notice in real life.
Hollywood took the word and made it its own. In 1925, the press hailed a new star: Count Ludwig von Salm-Hoogstraeten, an Austrian noble and tennis champion, rumoured to be appearing in a film for the producer Samuel Goldwyn. What made him Hollywood material? “He is photogenic“, Goldwyn told a reporter. Not talented or trained. Photogenic. “Photo” had quietly shifted from meaning light to being short for photograph, and the word now described someone who simply photographs well. Television followed, and in 1939 we got “telegenic“.
The studios had found their word for people who looked ordinary in person but extraordinary on screen. And the faces they rewarded were the ones that happened to suit harsh studio lighting and early film. A certain bone structure, a certain kind of skin. A technical accident slowly turned into a beauty standard.
That’s the version we inherited, and somewhere along the way, “photogenic” stopped meaning “the light did something beautiful” and started meaning “you were born with the right face”. And if you weren’t, the logic goes, you’ll never look good in photos, so why bother.
Even Hollywood’s most famous face didn’t quite fit that story. Amy Greene, a close friend of Marilyn Monroe, remembered walking down Broadway with her in plain clothes, with nobody noticing her at all. Then Marilyn turned and asked, “Do you want to see me become her?” Amy couldn’t explain what happened next, only that Marilyn “turned something on within herself that was almost like magic”. Suddenly cars were slowing down and people were stopping to stare. Same face, same clothes.
What changed was inside!
What I’ve actually seen in my studio
In sixteen years of photographing women, I can tell you that logic doesn’t hold up.
I’ve photographed women who are beautiful by every standard we’re taught to measure by, and who froze the moment the camera came up. Shoulders lifted towards their ears, chin pulled back, a nervous smile. And I’ve photographed women who would never describe themselves as attractive, who walked in nervous and shortly after were laughing, moving, completely themselves. Guess whose photos were better. That shift, from bracing yourself for the camera to simply being yourself, is a big part of why women over 40 are choosing portrait photography.
So it’s not just about the face. Most of what we call “unphotogenic” is tension, and tension shows up in the body first. When we’re uncomfortable, our shoulders rise, the breath is held in, the space between the chin and the shoulders shrinks, and suddenly there’s a double chin that wasn’t there five minutes ago. Bright light makes us squint, so the eyes look half closed. Try too hard to keep them open and you look startled instead. None of that is your face. It’s your body telling the camera how you feel.
So what does make a good photo?
A combination of things, and yes, some of them are technical. Light matters, of course, it’s in the name. Posing matters. Distance, angle, lens, all the parts I’ve spent years learning so that you don’t have to think about them.
But the thing that matters most is the one nobody puts on a kit lis: connection. How you feel in front of the camera, and who’s standing behind it.
I’ve been reading Il ritratto consapevole by Osmel Fabre, an Italian book on the psychology of portraiture, and one line has stayed with me: “If you look at someone with judgement, they defend themselves. If you look at them with presence, they show themselves.”
That’s it, really. When someone feels seen and understood, rather than assessed, their body lets go. The shoulders drop. The face softens. And what comes through on camera reads as confidence, because it is. Not the confidence of being “pretty”, the confidence of being comfortable.
That’s why I take time before the camera even comes out. Tea, conversation, no rush. Not as a nice extra, but because it’s the part that actually makes the photographs.
Let’s give photogenic its first meaning back
So maybe we don’t need to retire the word after all. Maybe we just need to give it back.
If you ask me what does photogenic mean, I’ll give you the 1839 answer: made by light. And by that definition, every single one of us is photogenic. Light falls on you, and it makes an image. That’s all a photograph has ever been.
What turns that image into a portrait you love isn’t the face you were born with. It’s the light, the care, and how it felt to be in the room.
One of the questions Fabre suggests asking during a session is this: “When was the last time you felt beautiful, not for how you looked, but for how you felt?” I’d like to ask you the same. Maybe sit with it for a moment.
If you’ve spent years saying “I’m not photogenic”, and especially if you’ve quietly stopped being in photos altogether, I’d love to show you what happens when the light does the work and you just get to be yourself.
If that feels like something you’d like to try, you can find out more about my portrait sessions for women over 40 here.
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