Nude Photos as Therapy, or Just Therapeutic?

Oct. 20, 2009— -- When Ellen Fisher Turk took her first nude portraits of a sex abuse victims two decades ago, and later of an anorexic, the photographer with a background in special education had little idea that she would become a seminal figure in the sometimes controversial world of phototherapy.

"My thinking was that going through the nudity part was similar to going through a phobia; you're afraid of going on a plane, you go on the plane," Turk said. "[But] I don't think it is necessary to be nude, it's just to be seen.

"I think that pictures are very, very extraordinary," she said.

Even before the New York-based Turk took her first photos of incest victims in the early '90s, she wasn't the only one to recognize that photos can help people who can't find solace or communicate in words alone.

She's now part of a disparate movement that goes by many names. What's known as phototherapy in England, for instance, is called therapeutic photography in North America. Even within the same country, experts disagree about what phototherapy really is or really does.

On one end may be professional photographers who intend for a single studio session to be therapeutic, and who may or may not undergo training in psychology. On the other are Ph.Ds who use the medium of photography to cut through the talk and get to visceral emotions.

Turk's work with incest victims, women suffering from eating disorders or even the terminally ill merged the worlds of photography and therapy. But she always prefaces her observations about how phototherapy works with the caveat that she's neither a scientist nor a licensed therapist.

During a photo session, Turk said she tries to show the victim's humanity and beauty in the series of photographs. Some anorexics walk away with a vision of themselves as others see them: ill but not fat. With incest victims, Turk said the women often walk away with compassion for themselves.

"With incest, I've see that as children, they took it as they did something wrong," Turk said. "What they see uniformly in the context of the photos is a lovely person, and they see a way to have compassion for that person."

Other people in the world of phototherapy say they came as artists not caretakers but realized the process of their work could be cathartic for the subjects of photographs, too.

Rosy Martin worked as a photographer in the United Kingdom for years and began exploring therapeutic photographs in the 1980s with phototherapy pioneer Jo Spence, a woman who documented her breast cancer through photos.

Eventually, Martin said, she got some training in psychology but still views the process with an artistic eye.

"It's very much giving someone the autonomy to tell their story and it's very much them performing their story," Martin said.

Martin said she screens her clients and meets with them several times before choosing a topic for a phototherapy session, most often a historical re-enactment of a memory in which the client role plays as the important people in that memory.

Martin will later bring back her clients to talk about the various photographs that, she said, helps her clients feel compassion for themselves and the people in their past.

"I think you do, actually, have to know something about photography and its language," Martin said. "And you have to know something about therapy and how to create safety and trust and provide permission and containment."

Indeed, many people in the field of phototherapy worry that, in the wrong hands, a person with identity issues could walk away from from a photo-posing photography session in worse shape than he or she came, regardless of whether the photo shoot was nude.

"I've known people who weren't ready to confront their bodies directly," said Judy Weiser, a licensed psychologist in Vancouver, Canada who does not photograph her clients. "It can be an intense experience.

One patient sought out Weiser after a session with a photographer went wrong. "The patient said, 'I saw myself and I suddenly realized my life was a fraud,'" she said.

Joel Walker, a psychiatrist in Toronto who invented the Walker Visuals that are commonly used in photo therapy, said he has occasionally used photos of a client taken during a session as a means of therapy.

Walker remembered a particular woman who suffered from uncontrolled bipolar disorder for years, but was finally able to confront her problem through photographs.

"I took pictures of her when she was so depressed," he said. "She was lying down, barely able to get up ... I also took a picture of her when she was manic."

Walker said the photos worked because the brain can't tune out an image in the same way it can tune out a conversation or something written. The photos were an undeniable vision of her moods.

"She took the two pictures and put them up on her fridge at home and, two weeks later, she was on medication," Walker said. "It made all the difference in the world, she started taking medication and her life turned around."