Feeling Ugly Is Not the Same as Being Ugly

Self-portrait of me shot in 2025 at Pocket Studios, Sydney, Australia.

Every time someone joins the Confidence Club, I ask them a question.

How would you best describe yourself in a photo?

I ask because I want to understand what people are carrying when they arrive. I want to know what the camera shows them before we even start talking about light, posing, angles, or how to look less like you’re being told off in a school photo.

And every time new people join, I’m so happy to see their faces pop up. Truly. I love that more people are coming into this space and wanting to feel better in photos.

But my heart also breaks a little. Not because they’re joining. Because of the answers. Ugly. Awkward. Unphotogenic. I see those words over and over again, and they never stop making me sad.

Because after more than 20 years as a portrait photographer, after photographing women in business, celebrities, musicians, authors, artists, politicians, people who are used to being seen and people who would rather hide behind a pot plant than have a camera pointed at them, I have never once looked through my lens and thought, “You’re ugly.”

Not once.

But I have watched women look at a perfectly beautiful photograph of themselves and say it before they’ve even really looked.

“I look ugly.”

And I get it. I really do.

I spent years thinking I was terrible in photos. That was the story I carried around about myself. I was the photographer, not the person in front of the camera. That felt much safer. I could control the light, the angle, the person, the frame. I could make someone else feel comfortable, but put the camera on me, and suddenly I was stiff, strange and deeply aware of every single part of my face.

The funny thing is that sharing posing tips happened quite naturally because I had needed them myself. I never thought I’d end up being the posing lady on the internet, but here we are. Tiny movements, leaning forward, looking away and back again, finding a go-to pose. These things helped me because they gave me something practical to do with all that discomfort.

But the practical stuff is only part of it.

A lot of liking photos of yourself has nothing to do with the pose. It has to do with self-acceptance. And that is much harder to teach in a ten-second reel.

The other day at Pilates, I kept saying, “I’m so tight.”

I said it once. Then I said it again. Then I probably said it another twelve times because apparently I enjoy turning one sensation into a personal brand.

And then I caught myself. Of course, I felt tight. I kept telling myself I was tight. I was scanning my body for tightness. I was looking for evidence. Every stretch became proof.

And I thought about how often we do this with photos.

“I’m ugly.”

“I’m awkward.”

“I’m not photogenic.”

“I always look terrible.”

Say something enough times, and it starts to feel less like a feeling and more like a fact. But feeling ugly and looking ugly are not the same thing. Feeling awkward and looking awkward are not the same thing. Sometimes a photo is just where all our old stories come to sit down.

We look at an image and think we are judging the photo, but we’re often judging so much more than that. We’re judging the version of ourselves we thought we’d be by now. We’re judging our age. We’re judging our face next to a filtered face we saw online five minutes ago. We’re judging our tiredness, our bodies, our expressions, our hair, our outfits, our lives. It all gets stuffed into one little rectangle, and then we call ourselves ugly.

That is a lot of power to give to one photograph.

One of the easiest ways to start liking photos of yourself is also the thing most people avoid. Take more photos. I know. Annoying. Very rude of me to say it. But it’s true.

The more photos I took of myself, the easier it became to look at myself. Not because I suddenly loved every photo. I absolutely did not. But because I became more familiar with my own face. I understood what worked for me. I learnt my angles. I noticed how small movements changed everything. I stopped being so surprised by myself.

That’s the thing about avoiding photos. It keeps you unfamiliar with yourself. And when you’re unfamiliar with yourself, every photo feels confronting.

Taking more photos is a bit like exposure therapy. Not in a dramatic, clinical way, but in the very ordinary sense that the thing you avoid becomes scarier the longer you avoid it. The more you practise being seen, the less alarming it becomes.

You don’t have to love every photo. You don’t even have to like most of them at the beginning. But you do have to stop treating every unflattering frame as evidence that there is something wrong with you because there isn’t.

A photograph is a split second. It is light, timing, angle, expression, movement, mood and whatever strange thing your mouth was doing halfway through a sentence. It is not your entire identity. It is not the final report card on your face. It is not proof that everyone else has been secretly lying to you.

Would someone who loves you describe you as ugly? Would your best friend? Your partner? Your child?

Probably not.

So why do we permit ourselves to use words no one who loves us would ever use? This is what I keep thinking about when I read the answers inside the Confidence Club.

I don’t think people are lying when they say they feel ugly in photos. I believe them. I know that feeling can be very real. But I also know that feelings are not always facts.

And I know from experience that the more you see yourself, the more you practise, the more you stop hiding from the camera, the less power those old words start to have.

You are not ugly. You may feel exposed.

The next time you look at a photo of yourself and your first thought is, “I look ugly,” I want you to pause. Ask yourself one question. Would someone who loves me use that word? If the answer is no, then maybe it’s time to stop using it too.

Not because you’re pretending everything is perfect. But because you deserve the same compassion you so freely give everyone else. And I think that’s where confidence begins.

Katie x