How boudoir photography boosts South Jersey women’s self-confidence

A few months ago, Heather Riley wasn’t exactly brimming with self-confidence.

She hadn’t lost all the baby weight after giving birth to her daughter, Riley, in June 2014. The 31-year-old Pleasantville mom was down. “I felt horrible about myself,” she said.

Wanting to feel attractive, she turned to her boyfriend’s friend, Beau Ridge, for help.

She set up a boudoir photo shoot at the Beau Ridge Photography studio in Absecon. Boudoir photography gets its name from a woman’s private dressing or bathing room. Women — mostly women, although there’s a true-life, no-foolin’ male equivalent known as “dudeoir” — evening dresses and pose to evoke sensuality and intimacy. It’s not selling sex as much as it is showing an intimate moment.

Riley brought three sets of lingerie, a sweater, and not much else. Ridge made her laugh and shot several poses in an hour-and-a-half session at the studio.

In a week, she had her book of photographs.

When she received the book, she glanced at it before letting her boyfriend, Rob English, see it.

“I thought, ‘Wow, I look like that? That’s me?’ I am still that attractive person even if I didn’t lose all that baby weight,” she said. “As cheesy and cliche as that sounds, it made me feel better about myself and the way I see myself.”

The subjects in boudoir photo shoots aren’t just evoking intimacy. Ridge said an intimate, familiar feeling runs through the entire photo shoot process.

“When you should be your most vulnerable, it’s the most genuine. When you can get someone to be happy, genuinely happy in that moment, you’ve broken through the hardest barrier to break through, which is self-image,” Ridge said. “I want boudoir photography to be the new watch that brides give their husbands.”

Ridge and the others who work with him in his South Jersey studio have been shooting more and more boudoir sessions in the past few months.

Although this type of photography has been around for decades, Ridge said he has an idea of why it is becoming more popular now. He calls it the purest form of photography.

“The media is focusing on people being themselves, and there’s the hashtag ‘NoFilter’ on social media,” he said, of the popular tag on Instagram and Twitter that indicates no touch-ups have been done to a photo. “To look at yourself and go, ‘Wow, that’s me, that’s amazing, I’m beautiful,’ there’s no feeling like it.”

The Absecon studio is a clean space, with a white comforter-covered bed in one corner and several background options. Clients have their makeup and hair done by Brittney Noguez. Music plays in the background. Ridge said he tries to make the clients laugh.

It’s about getting the client comfortable, he said. Not only for the client to feel at ease, but also for a photographer to keep the energy flowing so there are no awkward pauses.

“I flow through the shoot trying to do it quickly and efficiently,” he said. “But we also find that people will find their groove.

“They’ll find their moment and you just, boom boom boom boom boom,” he said, mimicking a camera shutter.

The reward of boudoir photography is in helping someone feel beautiful, Ridge said, and that has nothing to do with having a perfect model’s body. He said mothers, older women, curvy girls and women with other body styles can all have successful boudoir shoots.

“There was one woman who was having intermarital issues a little bit. She had had three kids; she’s a very curvy girl,” he said. “She called two days later (after receiving her book), crying. She said she hadn’t felt beautiful in 20 years.”

Gina Jost is used to having eyes on her. The Margate resident is choreographer, singer and dancer for the Almost Angels, an entertainment cover band based in Atlantic City.

On stage, she dances, often in costume, for her audiences. When the curtain falls, Jost said, she’s much more shy.

She decided to go to Ridge — someone Jost said she’s known since grade school — for a boudoir photo shoot as a semi-surprise gift to her husband, Dan.

“I guess I wanted to do something where I felt very beautiful and give it as a special gift to him,” she said. “I mean, you never know, we could look at this in a few years when I might not look the way I do now. Let me get those shots in now.”

Having perused Ridge’s other photo shoots, Jost said she was less anxious about being photographed in lingerie. Instead, she was excited to try something different.

“I would absolutely recommend doing it. I think it’s empowering and freeing,” she said. “I think it really makes you feel beautiful about yourself. It’s nice to have that kind of attention.”

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