Penny Millar

Penny Millar has been a renowned portrait photographer of children and families for over 30 years, earning a reputation as someone who shoots honest photographs that show more than simply ‘what people look like’. She has a gift for putting people at their ease, so they show her a range of natural expressions.

Trained as a special needs teacher, Penny has always been passionate about ‘how people tick’ and how they interact with the world and has regularly participated in and run self-awareness workshops, in the UK and the USA. Penny has an Intermediate Diploma in Executive Coaching from the Academy of Executive Coaching.

She enjoys a challenge. Her work has taken her to Ukraine where she was awarded a humanitarian award for using her photos of children and families affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster for fund-raising and awareness-raising. More recently she ‘photovoyaged’ an entire village of 68 people in rural France!

The story so far

In 1999 my stepdaughter took a black & white photograph of me. Instead of capturing my usual grinning-for-the-camera expression, she had asked me to look away and think my own thoughts. The result was a photo that I wasn’t sure I liked. Despite my protestations about the “crows feet round my eyes… my uneven mouth and pointy nose”, people seemed to really like it. I didn’t hate it, but it wasn’t a familiar ‘me’. At the time I was having voice lessons with Amy Fradon, an inspirational coach. Quite by chance, she came to my house and saw the photo. She too said she liked it, and as I went into my speech about the pointy nose she said “This is who you are when you sing.” She encouraged me to keep looking and then said what were to become immortal words… “Hold her in your hand and tell me who you see.” I held up the photo and immediately burst into tears (always a sign of a defining moment!) “the person” I saw and described was a strong woman… the one that somewhere inside I knew was me, just a version I didn’t easily acknowledge or “see”. “Put her on your wall and sing to her. She knows who you are” was Amy’s suggestion.

Something resonated here. I had always known how powerful my own photos of people were, but this was something new. Soon after this I visited a friend who was very troubled. I offered to take some photos of her – I think I wanted to show her the life and beauty in her that were rather hidden at that particular time (this was pre-photoVoyage but obviously something was brewing). The photos were lovely and I posted them to her. Weeks later I visited again and looked around, expecting to see them framed and on her wall. When I asked why she hadn’t put them on display, she said she still had them in the envelope – that she had found it “hard to look at them”. So we took them out, and laid them on the table. We started to notice the variety of expressions in front of us – the different ‘sides’ of her. I selected different shots, asking her to “find the one for your children”… “the one for your husband”… “your mother… which one would you chose for your mother and which one do you think she would choose of you?” This was getting really interesting!

There was one picture – a super straight-on shot that I really liked but she wasn’t selecting, even though I kept putting it in with her favourites. Finally, somewhat exasperated, I asked her why she wasn’t choosing that one, as I thought it was such a great photo of her. She shuddered, and said she couldn’t look at it because it really made her feel strange. Something resonated in me. “Pick her up, look at her and tell me who you see” I suggested. Her tears confirmed the importance of this photograph. She saw her strong and ‘true’ self looking back at her – she saw it as the one who ‘knew who she was’. “Put her on your wall and get to know and like her. She knows who you are” I said… and thus photoVoyage was born.

Development

I continued with this new way of working using friends and colleagues as guinea pigs. Some had no particular problems, others were at a challenging time in their lives – divorce, new job, reaching 50 or 60 – and two of them had cancer. I called this new project “photoVoyage – a journey of self discovery”, quickly seeing its power and potential. When we looked at the photos, we were looking for the positive, for the strong self that could accept who we were, make choices, feel good about ourselves and move forward with renewed confidence. Having spent 30 years photographing families and individuals who wanted to see the most flattering images of themselves, it was very interesting to be revealing the ‘real’ side of people.photoVoyage was an opportunity to explore a different way of using my portraits. I have always worked in black & white, feeling that hair colour or background detract from the facial expressions, so I knew this would work for photoVoyage.