A client who is also a writer asked if she could interview me. This is what she wrote.
by Sonja Stoll, writer
“I hate the word Boudoir,” frowns Kelvin Lim — a portrait photographer in Singapore who has been shooting people in the nude for 24 years.
Having started out as a wedding photographer, he dislikes the stylised posing that dominates both fields. Being hired at the time to capture how beautiful a woman looked in a certain dress led him to wonder about the person in that dress — about her beauty without all the trappings — and made him want to show someone’s personality raw and true.
Early on after opening his own portrait studio in 2007, Kelvin encountered an unusual client: a young woman on life support requested to be portrayed. She needed to be hooked up to an oxygen tank and was about to die within months.
“Up till then I’d always thought people were looking for this kind of representation of themselves in the prime of their lives. But here was this person wanting it when she was dying.”
The session prompted him to radically change his way of seeing and working. He realised that he still approached his sessions with a certain pre-conceived vision in mind, directing people and closing the shutter on a pose. Questioning the mechanics as well as the purpose of his artistic practice led him to a form of portraiture that would free both photographer and client of pre-defined expectations of the finished product — instead, they would engage in a mutually creative process with the aim of arriving at an emotional representation of someone’s personality.
Kelvin went from fast shooting framed by time slots and shot lists to open-ended sessions that always begin with an extended talk about a client’s aesthetic preferences, their motivations for the shoot, their history with their body, self-image, notions of beauty — at times, past trauma. It helps that he is a slender man of calm presence with a friendly twinkle in his eyes. A session will typically last three to four hours, during which an average of 150 pictures is taken, almost exclusively with a 50mm portrait lens.
Kelvin will use this time to quietly observe and learn about his subject — picking up on how they talk and move as he guides them with simple directions, noticing how, for example, someone’s finger is different from anyone else’s, and building on such details.
“I learn, and I learn to accept — because I of course have my own biases and visions, and now it’s time for me to let these dissolve and just capture what this person shows me.”
Since the early 2000s, boudoir photography has become increasingly popular as a tool of self-expression and empowerment, reflecting a cultural shift towards body positivity, redefined beauty standards, and the celebration of individuality. It is then surprising that researching studios online will prove that a large part of the market still emphasises eroticised, pin-up style representations of female bodies — the result of the shoot often intended as a gift for a boyfriend or husband, and hence for the male gaze.
It is indeed market forces that convinced Kelvin in the end to use “boudoir photography” for what he is offering, rather than something like “sensual portraiture.” He faces continued challenges with nomenclature, though — just a few weeks ago he received an enquiry about “Dudoir photography”: boudoir for the dudes.