I have always had a huge passion for Fashion . Starting with modelling at the age of 18 and stopped again at 25 , as my body and intuition told me I needed to move on with my path. I quit from one day to another and slowly started doing a bit of makeup on models for tests and that evolved into a career as a makeup artist for 5 years.
I always loved the whole process of creating images so i never really fell in love with the makeup itself it was the process I was a part of that kept me going.
So after the 5 years doing makeup I was at an age where many personal thing happened and i wanted to look inward and deal with myself so i looked around and ended up taking an education as a therapist based on principles from Chinese medicine .
In this process i had to go through a lot of therapy (to be a therapist you need to) and I really discovered many thing about my self and it was an amazing spiritual growth and it somehow opened my intuition even more. Because of this I started dreaming about big black and white portraits of models , every night for a month I was dreaming about photos, and at last I was like “ok what does this mean”, and it forced me to buy my first camera because maybe i needed to capture these images that kept me awake . The Camera was digital so i could immediately see what i was capturing and I just LOVED every part of it. I just had to learn more so I took the Photographer education here in Denmark (where i live) but as soon as i finished , I packed my family and moved to LA which I’ve always had been attracted by, because of the light and nature that surrounds it…
While all these things happened in my life, there has always been an underlying wish or almost a rebel inside of me wanting to change the worlds perception of beauty . At a very early stage of my makeup career and photographer life, I wanted to show diverse beauty and I loved to choose models that people didn’t expect for a certain job, and then show them that they were sooo wrong. Here i am talking about race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age… I somehow hoped that this desire could touch or maybe make someone feel seen and accepted when they saw my images and my choice of model…
So this leads us to this present moment, where I am at the age of 48 and I started modelling again. I never saw this coming, but now it feels like the most natural thing and a perfect extension of my desire of showing diversity. The only difference is, that this time I`am representing myself , I am the someone that would get touched , that needs to feel seen and accepted in a society where everything is about youth and Anti Age. In a society like this , women with age gets invisible and sometimes seen as not doing their best to look their best , unless they choose to chance their looks .
I honestly don’t care about what women do to feel their best , but I think the lack of natural looking women with age in The fashion magazines and campaigns is a huge mistake that especially will bring a lot of disillusions and stress for the coming generations of women.
I hope by putting myself out there , I can be a part of a PRO AGE movement of women showing that it’s okay to Age, and finally that its actually an honour to have lived many years and that our wrinkles and spots tells a beautiful story of a live lived…
Anja
Model and Artist: Anja Poulsen @anjapoulsen_creative_life www.anjapoulsen.com
Photographer: Conni Hvidberg