I got my first camera on my 12th birthday, a gift from my mother who, herself, had a great eye for photography when I was a kid. (My childhood photos are gorgeous.) It was a “Le Click” camera, pink and turquoise plastic, it took 110 film, and I was in love from the second I laid eyes on it.
That birthday, my mother let me have my first sleepover with three other girls from my grade 6 class and as soon as we were finished eating our cake, we whipped upstairs to dance around half-naked, lip syncing to Salt n’ Pepa’s “Push It”, while I took photos with my new camera and a couple of rolls of film. In the process of doing this, and being curious 12 and 13-year-old girls, nudes were taken. Nothing explicit, but definitely full moons from behind of all of us, and suggestive poses we’d seen in celebrity magazines. We thought NOTHING of it, and had no idea that what we were doing was against the law.
I gave my mom the film the next morning to be developed, and she took it into our local Zehr’s grocery store for 24-hour processing. The next day, she came home from work, and we had a serious talk about legality and appropriateness in regards to photography. Then she told me that the grocery store almost called the police, but the manager knew my mom and gave her the benefit of the doubt. The first thing I asked when I was allowed to speak was, “okay, but can I see the photos?” Exasperated, my mother explained that they showed her the photos, then destroyed them and the negatives in front of her. I only ever took photos of chickadees at our feeder, and pets, with that camera after that.
When I was 15, I let my boyfriend take nude Polaroids and explicit video of me because I wanted to see what I looked like, that way, through a lens. I knew that was illegal because of what happened before, but I thought it’d be fine because we’d bypassed processing, and only my boyfriend and I would ever know.
My mom got me another camera for my 19th birthday, a Canon Owl (?), when I was pregnant, with the idea that I would take photos of my baby and, of course, get free duplicates to share with her. I did take a million photos of my daughter with that camera, as my mother intended, but I also took an extraordinary amount of nudes with the camera’s self-timer, compared to how expensive it was, and still is, to shoot film. I know I’m not the first photographer on Earth to choose film, processing, or cigarettes over food, but I was on a single mom budget, and looking back at the photos I think, “no wonder I was so thin!”
In the year 2000, I got my first digital camera, a Sony Cybershot, and the first thing I did, after taking photos of my daughter, was take nudes of myself and put them on RateMeNude(dot)Com.
I was gifted a Logitech webcam and became a nude camgirl in 2001, where I experimented with instant digital photography and selfies long before cell phones had cameras in them. Back then, webcams were still images, taken and uploaded to a website, or “cam portal” instantly, every 30 seconds, at 320×240 resolution. I cammed this way, on the same site, daily, until the site shut down 14 years later, naked and vulnerable AF practically the whole time. I did streaming webcams for the 5 years following, on various platforms, but never caught the bug with video the way I originally did with instant digital photography.
Around 2003, my new, now former, husband, who ran a photo lab in University, got a retail job with Black’s Photography. Much to our delight, we were allowed to take the floor models of new cameras home to play with, in order to have family-friendly shots on the units to show potential customers. Of course, I took the cameras and, you guessed it, took nudes! My favourite was the Pentax Optio because it had filters before the inventors of Instagram were probably in high school, and I loved being able to preview and take a black & white photo, but also isolate blues, reds, and greens. That was pretty advanced at the time!
In 2011 I got really sick and almost died, and when I woke up, I was disfigured with no knowledge of what happened. Then I was really sick for a year and I went from having a Barbie body, to having a distended belly, with a 10 inch long scar running right up the middle. My perspective on life and bodies changed. I wanted to document EVERYTHING and show the world MY world. I decided I wanted to get back into photography, beyond taking snapshots of my kids with my point-and-shoot digital cameras, so I invested in my first SLR, a Canon Digital Rebel T3i.
In 2012, I attended an arts retreat in New Hampshire, called Squam, where I took a photography workshop with Thea Coughlin, a fantastic portrait photographer, well-known for her “Spirit Sessions” where she would take a lady, make her feel special, then capture a specific facet inside her with her camera. She inspired me to want to take photos of people, which continue to be my favourite thing to shoot to this day – aside from myself, macarons, and dead things!
Sex and sexuality, nudity, eroticism, fetishes, kinks, quirks, imperfect bodies, exhibitionism, voyeurism, shibari, and documentation of extraordinary things for posterity are my primary photographic interests and always have been. I’ve been making adult content, of myself, as an adult for 20 years, but really, since the second I got a camera in my hand when I was 12. Now I want to put my knowledge of lenses, lighting, and angles, as well as my 20 years of experience in the adult internet entertainment industry to good use, photographing, documenting, and making content for other people! Let’s subvert the dominant paradigm and make great art together!