What is “Personal Portraiture by Faby and Carlo”? Our goal as photographers is to capture the essence of a woman, in a way more intense than a simple headshot. So far, Boudoir Photography has been the name that better identified the level of intimacy our images convey. Lately, though, we have been toying with a slightly different name to identify our style, and personal portraiture seems to hit the right notes.
A name will never identify a style of photography, yet from time to time there is the need to describe what we do. When asked “em>what style of photography do you do” or told “do you photograph babies?“, a quick answer telling people what we do is in order. If you combine this with an attention span of few seconds, we realised that saying we specialise in something exotic like “boudoir photography” is still not the best pitch.
Personal Portraiture is still not self-explanatory, but it seems to play a better role in making people imagine what we do.

The fall of Page 3 and Glamour in the UK

When we started photographing Boudoir, we were the first to do it in London. The word was still completely unknown, and it did not evoke any kind of images in people. We called ourselves “London Boudoir Photography” and we started refining our portfolio, trying to reach the balance of Elegance and intensity we love.
At the time, being a Boudoir photographer was something that could have been explained only through your photographs. It was exotic and a little “hush hush“.
The style then started getting more attention in the past few years, people started understanding it a little bit more, but something else happened. The UK Glamour, provocative, hyper-sexualised images of young girls with plenty of curves, saw a collapse in its market. Many magazines closed down, some decided to tone down their contents, and the Page 3 of The Sun was one of the few remaining. For photographers, the market shrunk in matters of months, leaving many without paid work. What was more, was that the word “glamour” gained a much more negative accent: it become the devil. The result was that the many glamour photographers who provided contents to the now-deceased publications, saw in the name of their style a possibility to stay alive, and many of them rebranded themselves as boudoir photographers.

Personal Portraiture as more than a simple head shoot

With an influx of very racy photos being branded as “Boudoir“, the perception of what we do started going downhill. What we had to do to make people understand what our style really is become harder. Nowadays, the work boudoir does not mainly evoke question marks, but evokes images that are more in tune with the Page3 than to elegant portraits in lingerie.
Last weekend we were exhibiting at Brides the Show, and we had the possibility to test the reaction of people, not just facing our images, but listening to what we had to say for just few seconds. Saying we were boudoir photographers generated few interested faces and many skeptical ones. Mentioning that we specialise in “personal portraiture”, that we photograph women, for women, elegantly, gave us a much more positive response.

Boudoir is dead! Long life to Boudoir!

No, Boudoir is not dead. It is alive and kicking, but it has a big fracture in the way it is perceived. It is still an incredible self-confidence booster for women, but it feels that in the UK the word has replaced “glamour”.
We still believe that a Boudoir Personal Portraiture Experience is something every women should try, but we have decided to become more and more subtle in the way we present ourselves.

Hi, we are Faby and Carlo, we specialise in personal portraiture. We photograph women for women, elegantly. Sometimes showing the soft side of women, some other photographing them as they were in a La Perla advert, some others in beautiful art nude. Our images are as intense as the person we photograph, after all we are women’s personal photographers.