So, You’re Trauma-Informed? What the Hell Does That Actually Mean in Photography?

“Trauma-informed” has become one of those phrases we see everywhere now.

Trauma-informed yoga. Trauma-informed coaching. Trauma-informed workplaces. Trauma-informed photography.

Which is great.

But also… what the hell does that actually mean?

Because putting the words in your bio doesn’t automatically change the way somebody experiences being in a room with you.

For me, trauma-informed photography starts with something much bigger than photography itself.

It starts with understanding that trauma, rupture, grief, overwhelm, fear, loss, change and disappointment are part and parcel of being alive. We are human. We are part of the natural world. We love things we will eventually lose. Our bodies change. Relationships change. Birth happens. Death happens. Life, at times, becomes bigger than our capacity to hold everything that is happening in that particular moment.

None of us gets through a lifetime untouched by that.

And so much of what matters is not simply what happens to us, but how those experiences are processed, how they are held, whether we have support around us, whether we have agency and choice, whether somebody listens, whether our emotions are allowed to move, and whether our bodies are given enough safety and space to come out of that state of protection rather than having to keep holding it.

Sometimes that might quite literally look like shaking, trembling, crying, moving, breathing, making sound or in other words, the body finding its way back towards regulation and expressing something that, in the moment, it may not have had the safety or capacity to express.

It’s not only about making sense of an experience with our minds. It’s also about what our bodies are able to do with it.

That understanding has profoundly shaped how I work with people.

Not because I’m trying to uncover anybody’s trauma.

A photoshoot isn’t therapy, and I’m certainly not there to diagnose somebody, analyse them or encourage them to disclose parts of their story they don’t want to share.

Quite the opposite.

I don’t need to know what has happened to you to understand that things have happened to you.

You’re human.

You arrive in front of my camera with a history. A relationship with your body. A relationship with being seen. With vulnerability. Control. Identity. Self-expression. Belonging. Touch. Choice.

Some of those relationships might feel incredibly easy.

Some might not.

And I probably know very little about most of your lived experience.

But I can still work in a way that respects it.

At its foundation, trauma-informed practice is built around things like physical and psychological safety, trust, collaboration, empowerment, voice and choice. Those principles have traditionally been talked about within health and social services, but I think they have enormous relevance anywhere humans are asked to become vulnerable.

And being photographed can be incredibly vulnerable.

There is a strange little power dynamic in photography that we don’t talk about enough. If you’ve ever had an unpleasant or uncomfortable experience with a photographer, that dynamic becomes wildly relevant.

One person is holding the camera and the other is being looked at. Directed. Recorded. Interpreted. Intimately represented through somebody else’s eyes.

I decide where the frame begins and ends. I decide when to press the shutter. I decide which fraction of a second gets made permanent.

That is a considerable amount of power when you really think about it.

And unless you consciously create something more collaborative, photography can very easily become:

I photograph. You become what you think I want to see.

That has never interested me very much.

I want the making of a photograph to feel like something we are creating together.

And that is where consent becomes so much bigger than signing a model release.

Of course contracts matter. Permission to photograph someone matters. Permission to share images matters.

But there’s another layer of consent happening throughout a shoot.

Are you comfortable here? Do you want to try this? Do you want more direction or less? Would you like to see what I’m seeing? Do you want that photograph shared publicly or would you rather keep it for yourself? Do you need a minute? Does this actually feel like you? Do you want to explore something new?

And perhaps most importantly: do you know you can change your mind?

I want someone to know they can tell me no. They can make a suggestion. They can stop. They can put something back on. Take something off. Move differently. Laugh at an idea. Tell me something feels strange. Ask if we can try the thing they’ve secretly been thinking about for three weeks.

They don’t have to override themselves because they think the photographer knows best.

Because once somebody truly understands that they have choice, something changes.

They stop trying so hard to get it right.

And very often, that’s when I begin to see them.

This probably becomes most obvious in the work I create with women.

So many women arrive in front of a camera carrying an extraordinary number of ideas about how they’re supposed to look.

Stand like this. Hide that. Turn your body this way. Don’t show your stomach. Smile. I hate my smile. Look natural. Be feminine. Be sexy, but not too sexy. Be confident. Not that way.

And now somehow remember all of that while somebody points a giant lens at you.

Of course people feel uncomfortable.

So I’m much less interested in immediately putting someone into a series of shapes than I am in creating enough space for them to begin inhabiting themselves.

We move. We talk. We breathe. We wander. We get distracted. We laugh. Sometimes we sit in silence for a while.

Sometimes I direct heavily. Sometimes I barely direct at all.

Sometimes something deeply emotional happens.

Sometimes the whole experience is light and funny and playful.

All is welcome here.

There is no prize for vulnerability.

Nobody needs to cry for the experience to have meant something. Nobody needs to reveal their deepest wound. Nobody needs to have some enormous life-changing breakthrough because they booked a portrait session.

Don’t get me wrong, photography can definitely be healing. I’ve seen that happen more times than I can count.

Being witnessed can be healing.

Seeing yourself differently can be healing.

Taking ownership of the way you are seen can be healing.

Creating something purely for yourself can be healing.

But I never want healing itself to become another expectation somebody feels they need to meet for me.

Trauma-informed does not have to mean trauma-centred.

There is room for joy here. Pleasure. Play. Adventure. Sensuality. Pride. Grief. Nervousness. Curiosity. Tenderness. Ridiculousness.

The whole human gets to come to the party.

And the more I ponder all of this lately, the more I’ve realised that although this comes readily to the surface in my work with women, it’s actually threaded through nearly every kind of photography I do.

Because ultimately this isn’t about a particular genre.

It is about how we meet people in any given moment.

Maybe part of why this matters so much to me is that photography isn’t actually where my relationship with this kind of work began.

Before I worked full-time with a camera, I spent around fifteen years as a massage therapist. And although technically I was working with bodies, it very rarely felt like it was only about muscles.

People talked.

They brought their relationships, grief, fears, histories, bodies and lives into the room with them. The work became incredibly intuitive for me — part body work, part listening, part simply being present with another person.

People have always seemed to bring me their stories.

Eventually I burned out and stepped away from massage, moving more fully into photography. I think part of me imagined I was moving towards something lighter. I was going to make art, tell stories, use my camera.

But very early in my full-time photography career, I had a portrait session that changed something for me.

The woman I was photographing had lived and survived through experiences that carried an enormous amount of weight. She was nervous, but as the session progressed she also expressed her vitality for life, her voice, and the audacity to be powerful and completely herself. The session itself was extraordinary in more ways than I can describe here, but afterwards I remember feeling incredibly heavy and emotional.

It stayed with me for weeks.

Not because I believed I had done anything wrong, but because I realised there was something happening in these spaces that I didn’t yet fully understand.

People were trusting me with much more than how they looked in a photograph.

Even holding space as a photographer, my clients were bringing their bodies, histories, vulnerability and stories into the room with them — and I wanted to know how to meet that responsibly.

I remember thinking there must be something I can learn.

Some framework for understanding what happens in these moments. How trauma lives through the body. What safety actually means. How agency, consent, choice and nervous-system responses shape an experience. How to stay compassionate and present without taking everything home with me.

Those questions sent me into trauma-informed study. And it has quite literally changed the way I see people and myself. Not because it taught me to search for trauma everywhere.

It taught me to become more curious.

To understand that a response that might look confusing from the outside often makes perfect sense when you understand what the nervous system is trying to protect.

To think differently about safety, autonomy, boundaries, power, consent and choice.

And perhaps just as importantly, it taught me that holding space for another person does not mean absorbing everything they bring into it.

That was something I needed to learn too.

Because compassion without boundaries eventually becomes unsustainable.

Over the years photography has continued to bring me into incredibly diverse human spaces. And I’ve come to understand that there is a real gift in being someone people feel safe enough to open up around — provided I also have the education, boundaries and self-awareness to meet that trust with care.

Trauma-informed study has also done something else for me that feels harder to put into words.

It has informed my own healing.

The more deeply I have come to understand my own patterns, protective responses, wounds, boundaries, needs and ways of moving through the world, the more capacity I seem to have to meet another person in theirs.

Not because our experiences are the same.

They rarely are.

But because knowing myself more deeply has given me a much greater respect for the complexity of somebody else.

We are relational beings. So much of how we understand ourselves comes through relationship — through the people whose paths cross ours, the people we love, the people who challenge us, the people who reflect something back to us that we hadn’t yet been able to see.

Sometimes another person says something and it lands somewhere surprisingly deep.

Sometimes you read somebody’s writing and recognise a part of yourself inside it.

You hear a song and suddenly somebody else has found words for something you have carried for years.

You sit with a landscape for long enough and somehow it draws something out of you.

You make art.

You tell a story.

You sit across from another human being and something in their experience resonates with something in your own.

Not because you have lived the same life, but because beneath all of our individual stories there are these very human experiences we keep meeting again and again — love, grief, fear, belonging, loss, longing, shame, joy, desire, change.

Perhaps the more deeply I know myself, the more room I have to genuinely know you.

And perhaps knowing you, in turn, reveals something more of me.

I think somewhere along the way we became very attached to the idea that healing should be an individual pursuit. That we should become self-sufficient little islands, process everything ourselves, fix ourselves, regulate ourselves and emerge independently whole.

But humans have never really worked that way.

We heal in relationship.

We heal through being witnessed.

Through being listened to.

Through safe touch.

Through community.

Through creating things together.

Through sitting around kitchen tables, walking through forests, grieving together, laughing together, telling stories and recognising ourselves in one another.

We heal in villages.

And maybe this is one of the reasons photography continues to feel so meaningful to me.

Because at its best, it is relational too.

There is a person on either side of the camera.

We affect one another.

Something is being exchanged.

I bring my own lived experience, sensitivity, curiosity and way of seeing into the room, and the person in front of me brings their unique expression and essence.

The photograph emerges somewhere in the meeting place between us.

That doesn’t mean blurring boundaries or making somebody else’s experience about me. Quite the opposite. The more work I have done on understanding myself, the more clearly I can recognise what belongs to me and what belongs to somebody else.

But I don’t believe we create meaningful work by pretending we are neutral observers either.

We are humans meeting humans.

And that relationship matters.

I’ve worked with families in all kinds of circumstances, including the incredibly delicate charity work I’ve done with A Star is Born, photographing stillborn babies and their families.

It may be one of the most painful days of a parent’s life, and yet you are being trusted to create something that may become one of the very few tangible things they have of their baby. That kind of work asks you to be present, compassionate and incredibly aware — to understand when to lift the camera, when not to, and how to honour what is happening without trying to change or extract anything from it.

A seemingly ordinary family portrait can hold its own unseen history too — years of IVF, pregnancy loss, a difficult birth, exhaustion, fear, hope, grief, insecurity or simply the enormity of finally having that child in their arms.

I don’t necessarily know.

And I don’t need to know everything.

But I can remember that there is always more to somebody’s story than what I can see.

When I’m photographing a family, I’m not particularly interested in forcing everyone into perfect behaviour for an hour.

There might be a toddler having a very big day. A parent who has barely slept. Someone feeling uncomfortable in their body. A teenager who doesn’t really want to be photographed. A family who fought for years to have the child now wriggling out of their arms.

Maybe that seemingly ordinary photograph of a parent holding a child carries ten years of history inside it.

If I’m entirely focused on forcing everybody into compliance because I need to make my photograph, I miss the actual story standing in front of me. Sometimes it’s not just me trying to create the compliance, I see it in parents all the time too. Constantly apologising for their kids’ defiance. I have to assure you I am here for all of it, the messy middle, the wildness. When we surrender to it, I promise you, it’s where the good bits are anyway.

Connection interests me more than getting it perfect.

Believe it or not, it happens in business photography too.

Someone can stand neatly next to a laptop or the latest project launch and smile and we can call it brand content. Sure.

But what does that tell me about them?

Why did they start the business?

What matters to them?

What have they risked?

What did they have to overcome to get here?

What part of their work makes them come alive when they start talking about it?

What do their clients actually trust them with?

Showing up visibly in your own business carries its own particular vulnerability. There can be years of reinvention, doubt, financial pressure, courage and sheer determination sitting behind one perfectly nice professional headshot.

So perhaps we sit down first.

Perhaps we talk.

Perhaps we have the cuppa tea.

Understand what matters to someone before immediately trying to turn their life, business or place into content.

It sounds ridiculously simple.

Maybe because it is.

Sometimes the most important part of a photoshoot happens while my camera is still sitting in the bag.

It’s the story somebody tells after twenty minutes of conversation.

The photograph they admit they’ve always hated of themselves.

The person missing from the family.

The years it took to build the business.

The reason that particular landscape matters.

The thing they’re worried is going to look awkward.

The little comment somebody makes almost in passing that completely changes my understanding of what we’re creating together.

That information gives photographs emotional depth.

Not because I’m digging around looking for somebody’s pain so I can make more interesting art.

I’m not interested in mining people’s difficult experiences for photographs.

Authentic connection gives the work depth because I’ve taken the time to actually understand something about the person I’m photographing.

And importantly, none of this means we need to tiptoe around each other.

Trauma-informed photography doesn’t mean every session needs to be painfully serious or emotionally heavy.

Far from it.

My shoots involve swearing, terrible jokes, climbing over things, lying in rivers, getting muddy, laughing until somebody snorts (often me), changing our minds halfway through an idea and occasionally wondering what on earth we are doing. Because half the time I have no idea.

Safety doesn’t require sterility.

In fact, I think genuine safety creates more room for play.

More room to experiment.

More room for someone to say, “This feels weird.”

More room for someone else to say, “Actually, I really want to try this.”

More room for creativity to become something shared rather than something imposed.

And perhaps this is the simplest way I know how to explain what being trauma-informed means to me:

I don’t need to know your trauma to respect your humanity.

I don’t need to know why something feels uncomfortable to respect that it does.

You don’t need to justify a boundary to me.

You don’t need to become emotionally exposed for me to make a meaningful photograph of you.

You don’t owe me your hardest stories.

I can simply work from the understanding that people are complicated.

We carry extraordinary things.

Beautiful things.

Painful things.

Funny things.

Things we talk about easily and things we may never tell another person.

And all of that brings me to something that perhaps sounds strange coming from a photographer.

The photograph comes second.

The human comes first.

Because emotional depth isn’t something I can add later in Photoshop.

It comes from attention.

Curiosity.

Trust.

Time.

Choice.

Observation.

Collaboration.

Actually listening.

Whether I’m photographing a woman standing half-dressed in a river, a newborn arriving after years of hoping, a family tangled together on the couch, or an entrepreneur trying to put something they deeply care about into the world, I’m fundamentally trying to do the same thing.

Meet the human first.

Understand what I can.

Pay attention to what I don’t know.

Create something together rather than simply taking something from them.

And then, when the moment comes—

lift the camera.

Over and out, from my wild heart to yours.
Kass x

Want to learn more?

If this way of thinking resonates with you, I encourage you to study it further.

Trauma-informed education has been some of the most valuable learning I’ve done, not only for my photography, but for the way I understand people, behaviour, relationships, the body and my own responses to the world around me.

I completed SomaPsych’s 300-hour trauma-informed programme, as well as a 100-hour trauma-informed Yin Yoga training, and both have had a profound influence on how I work and how I move through the world.

For anyone who is curious but not ready to dive into a larger training, Amanda also offers shorter introductory courses which are a really accessible place to begin.

I firmly believe we need more of us getting into these rooms.

Photographers, coaches, facilitators, bodyworkers, business owners, parents, leaders — really, anyone who works closely with other humans.

You don’t have to become a therapist.

You don’t have to make trauma the centre of your work.

But learning more about nervous systems, safety, agency, consent, behaviour, regulation and the ways our experiences can shape us gives us a much deeper lens through which to understand one another and ultimately ourselves.

And I think the world could use a lot more of that.

Resources

SomaPsych

300-hour Trauma-Informed Programme

100-hour Trauma-Informed Yin Yoga Training