“Portraits of the heart”, a beauty day and photo shoot to boost self-esteem

For ten years, the Secours populaire in collaboration with the French Federation of Photography and Image Professions organizes the “Portraits of the Heart” operation each year, during which women in precarious situations can be pampered and photographed. A meeting organized this year on Sunday March 6, two days before International Women’s Rights Day.

On the program: manicure, hairstyle and photo session to allow everyone to leave with their portrait. For these women, being the center of attention, with a whole team there to showcase them, is unprecedented.

We’re treated like princesses, and that never happens. It’s nice !

It must be said that not all of these women have the means to afford these small pleasures. Taking care of them is a luxury they cannot afford: “They come to take care of themselves, points out Nicole Rouvet, general secretary of Secours Populaire Haute-Loire. It is important ! It’s revaluing yourself, trusting yourself, it’s existing… When you have the Smic, or even less, you put the children first, the house, before you. It needs to change !”.

Beyond the moment of well-being, far from material worries, which is offered to them, these women can also reconcile with their image, their body, their smile. By dint of forgetting themselves, they end up no longer having confidence in themselves. Some, like Natacha, find it difficult to recognize that they can simply be beautiful. The message is also that even in difficulties, we have the right to look at ourselves and to be beautiful.

Pto portray these women is to show them that they “deserve” to be looked at, valued, admired. A rediscovery that sometimes arouses a lot of emotion. For the photographers, who had set up two shooting sets and a technical corner to carry out the developments and prints on site, these are intense moments from a human point of view: “For us, it’s a lot of emotion, says Denis Grudet, professional photographer. There is no financial report, we are all volunteers. The result of our work, we have it by the tears and the smiles that the beneficiaries offer us.”