I have been asked several times “Why that picture on the
front of your book?”
It is a hugely significant picture for me personally as I
took it in Paris when I was utterly, utterly broken. After an extremely painful
break up, two of my wonderful friends took me there on a short photography trip
and it was on a chilly Parisian afternoon in 2012 that I captured this shot and
it summed up perfectly how I was feeling at the time, exposed, raw and totally
off my guard. I had been a semi professional photographer for several years at
that point and wondering around with my camera, usually in far less glamorous
locations, had kept me grounded throughout many hard times but this latest bump
in my road had really knocked me to the kerb. Homeless and jobless, it felt
like my camera was the only possession of any value that I did have left and as
I wondered around the fields near my mother’s house, where I had fled to in my hour
of need, I tried to connect with nature through the lens in the way I had
before, it wasn’t really working but I tried. I had mentioned that I was
struggling to ‘find my eye’…and everything else for that matter…to my friends.
Right! they said, photographers themselves, we need a trip. So off we went to
Paris, a place one cannot fail to find something inspiring to photograph!
The first day, I
struggled. The second day, with the warm encouragement of my friends, the pain
haze began to lift a little and Paris came into view through the blur. I took a
couple of shots that were okayish. On the third day, we walked to photograph
the bridges over the Seine, the main river through Paris and particularly the
locks that adorn them. Locks can be purchased and messages written on them,
messages of love and remembrance and whilst we were there snapping away, men
were down on one knee proposing to the cheers of happy, excited on lookers…it
was all a bit too much for a broken hearted woman like me so I wondered off to
be alone for a few moments and reflect. As I stood on the next bridge, my tears
dropping into the flowing river, also full of locks, thrown in in hopefully anticipation
of happy futures, I contemplated mine and how I would get from where I was now,
to the marriage proposal that I so wanted. It seemed an impossibly enormous mountain
to climb in that moment.
And as I mused over how I was going to do this, my eye was
caught by a young woman who seemed pretty irritated and uncomfortable. She was
wearing a very inappropriate little black dress for the breezy Parisian weather,
when the rest of us where bundled up in coats and her hair was giving her all
sorts of problems blowing over her red lipsticked face. She did not look like
she was enjoying her view of the Eiffel Tower across the river at all! I watched
her, realising that she looked a lot like I did back in the days when I was
dating bad men, dress way too short, everything in full view and my long black
hair wildly trying to attract attention. She was getting looks no doubt about
it but they weren’t admiring ones. I felt a little sorry for her, she was
trying way too hard to get noticed and it wasn’t making her at all happy. Hmm I
knew that feeling. Then I noticed the photographer, she was a model! He was a
distance away from her so it wasn’t obvious at first that her posturing and
preening was for him but she was trying soo hard to give him what he wanted,
despite her physical discomfort and obvious embarrassment that her skirt was
blowing up in the wind, as he barked and growled his orders over and over again
at her. HA I thought, I know THAT feeling too! You’re all dressed up to the
nines, giving it your all, exposing your inner most self, finding yourself humiliated
and exhausted and it still isn’t good enough for him!!
I had to capture this
lightbulb moment for me, with my camera, I had to have a reminder of this scene
because if I was to go home to England and have the future that I wanted, I
never should be preening and posing, compromising and exposing myself to get a
man EVER again. I had realised in that moment, standing there alone on a bridge
in Paris, that I was going to have to change everything about how I was looking
for love. So, I printed this picture out when I got home and framed it and it hung
on my wall and all through the next three years of dating disasters, it reminded
me to keep on my path to find love and NOT fall back into my previous habit of
trying to please the type of men that just weren’t good for me. This picture
was my inspiration to find the man and the love that I really deserved and to
never be that manipulated and publicly humiliated woman again. This picture
that is now on the front of my book “Why Good Women Date Bad Men” was a hugely
important part of my happy ever after journey which resulted in a down on one
knee proposal from my darling husband and I hope it will be to other women who
look at it and use the book to help them find their Good Man.
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