Response to I like it, the subject doesn't

I read about Imogen Cunningham not wanting to personally deliver her printing work to her customers because of this. In accompanying a photograph of her aged father, she wrote (paraphrase) "Give me a homely man for he has no illusions about himself." Kind of the same thing here. It's like hearing your voice on a tape recorder. There is nothing in the way this person looks that would make her look "bad" from an objective viewpoint. I guess the expression of dissatisfaction with a portrait by its subject speaks an entirely different story than the portait itself. My mother has to put on lipstick before she'll let anyone take a photograph of her, or else she gets angry as if the photographer is trying to show her in a bad light. Some of my favorite photographs of her are ones she can't stand.

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