Becoming the Woman in the Portrait

Melanie Grimsley

This year 1st place in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize goes to Martina Holmberg for this beautiful portrait of community member Melanie Grimsley.

This portrait is a part of Martina’s wonderful The Outside of Inside series, which includes many different people with various visible differences. 

In today’s blogpost, Melanie has shared with us the impact of having this portrait taken, touching on representation in the arts, society’s views of difference, and how it feels to be truly seen.

Photograph ©️ Martina Holmberg.

Like all children, especially little girls, my understanding of beauty began with princesses and evil outlaws, beasts that turned into princes, and ugly ducklings that became swans. I was an ugly duckling, but I could never be a swan.

Stories of good and evil, scarred villains and ugly witches seemed to seep into my skin. Other people’s gaze became my cage; words like ‘freaky face’ still land on a bruise that never quite gets a chance to heal.

People often told me I was pretty on the inside, as though I were being handed a consolation prize in a race I could never win. Beauty, they said, could be mine in other ways, but never the one I longed for.

I absorbed the fairytales, the scarred horror characters, the full-coverage makeup and all the staring; from those who looked away and those who couldn’t stop looking. I never saw myself reflected in music, art, or literature, except as something tragic, or something inherently bad.

My parents taught me that belonging was mine to define, and that if others took issue, it was never mine to carry. Their defiance was, and still is, my lifeblood. I never shied away from the world, even when I wasn’t sure of my place in it. I worked hard, achieved academically, inspired the way people expected me to, yet I never believed I would find belonging among the beautiful.

As other people’s gaze turned toward me, my own gaze turned away. I didn’t really see myself any more than they did. The pain of walking through the world as I do felt too big, too much, so I refused to see the cost of what I carried.

Only in recent years have I truly looked at the girl in the old photos, and this time I have not turned away. I held the pain until it burned again, and realised the depth of my survival and the breadth of my recovery. I let myself emerge, and in doing so I learned compassion for the scars I once wanted to erase.

By the time my portrait was taken, something in me had changed. For the first time in my life, I had seen my whole self.

The exhibition my portrait belongs to is called The Outside of the Inside. And my inside had expanded.

Quiet was the voice that called me ugly. I no longer believed the narrative that my face only belonged on the dark side of the story, or in the blinding light of survival.

The wonder I’m holding now is both the gravity of the cost and the magnitude of the outcome.

As someone who has never invited gaze, but has always been defined by it, this is a huge step to choose to show up in this way. I feel as though I have turned up as my whole self and finally been seen.

This portrait isn’t about overcoming. It’s not a before-and-after. It’s not about beauty despite my face. It’s about beauty with it.

It’s about truth and being willing to meet it. In my own skin, in my own eyes, and now, in yours.

The girl in the photo became the woman in the portrait, not by posing or leaning into a story, but by sitting in the openness of a window, and leaning into the light.

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