HOW TO BOOK YOUR PORTRAIT JOURNEY

01 — Choose Your Portrait Experience
Explore The Story and Soul offerings and select the portrait experience that best reflects what you want to celebrate, preserve, reclaim, or bring into view.

02 — Submit Your Inquiry
Complete the brief Portrait Experience Inquiry with your preferred date, location, and a little about what you're envisioning. Submitting an inquiry does not reserve your date.

03 — Confirm Your Session
I’ll personally review your inquiry and contact you within 48 hours to confirm availability and complete a brief consultation to better understand your vision

04 — Complete Your Client Agreement and Book your Session
Once your session details are confirmed, you’ll receive a private link to return to this page to complete your Story & Soul Client Agreement where you will also be able to pay and book your session. 

05 — Your Portrait Journey
Arrive as you are. I’ll guide you through your experience with creative direction, movement, posing, and space to simply be present. You do not need to know how to pose or perform for the camera. 

06 — Your Story, Preserved

Your professionally edited photographs will be delivered through a private custom online gallery for you to experience, download, share, print, and preserve.

CHOOSE YOUR PORTRAIT EXPERIENCE BELOW

Food For Thought: What is AI doing to the art of photography?

Over the last couple of years, I became very discouraged in my photography journey with the rise of strikingly beautiful and realistic images generated by AI. But AI is just that: artificial intelligence, and like everything in life, it ebbs and flows, ignites and burns, and morphs and changes. We can work with the current or against it. I've learned that it's better to use it to my advantage and work with it, rather than against it.  And along the way, here is the truth I have realized:

A woman can't AI-generate the experience of standing in her own self-reclamation session and realizing she feels beautiful again. AI can't photograph her actual pregnant body before it changes or capture the full beauty, significance, and gravity of that change. It can't preserve the authenticity of how her two-year-old curls into her chest like home. It can't document the way her husband looked at her at their wedding, or the fire in her eyes after finding the courage to leave an abusive relationship. It can't walk around a retreat and notice the spontaneous moment when two women embrace, cry, or beam with the joy of cleansing and renewal. Those images become valuable precisely because the event really happened. What is real, will always carry a certain substance that cannot be duplicated or distorted. Human experience is a luxury and the raw depth of a woman is premium. 

AI can make a fictional wellness practitioner sitting in an immaculate studio. But if a client is building a personal brand, eventually people want to see her—her actual face, her actual practice, her actual environment, her actual energy, her actual work. AI imagery can supplement that visual world, but it can't replace authentic documentation and connection. 

So I think photography is splitting into two categories:

Imagery is becoming extraordinarily cheap.
Memory, identity, documentation, authenticity, transition, experience, and human presence remain valuable and timeless. 

That is why my work is a Portrait Experience, one that elevates, celebrates, and empowers women in particular. At Story and Soul it's about capturing the feeling, the depth, the essence of the woman, and the story. Not the "image". The image is just a vessel for the soul's light to shine through. 

The beauty of AI is that it helps you conceive a world, any world you can imagine, and my direction and photography makes that world belong to an actual woman.

So now I ask of you, the same way I asked myself, "What belongs to you?" What is the one thing that no one can take away, even when your physical body is no longer here? That's the story and that's the soul. 

-Jazmine Desarrae

From the collection of an original self-portrait series, "Soft and Sensual" by the author, Jazmine Desarrae.