PORTRAITS OF A LADY

There’s a tiny storefront on Camp Bowie in Fort Worth where a lady can stop off while her man is away. Once inside she can peel off the gray vestiges of corporate life or her jelly-stained jogging suit and slip into something soft and sexy. She can drape a feather black boa across her shoulders and lounge across a huge antique bed that’s spread in creamy satin. Then she can sip a couple of glasses of wine and flash her best come-hither smiles. Someone will be taking pictures-but there’s no cause for alarm. These photos are for evidence, but not the legal type.

This two-hour session of afternoon delight comes with the $85 sitting fee at a new, entirely above-the-board business called Soft Touch Portraits. Scented candles, sultry saxophone music, and a coffee (able book about Marlene Dietrich help set the mood as co-owners Connie Fletcher and Sherry Potter work at photographing their female clients at their most romantic. Fletcher is the makeup artist; she tousles and mousses hair, heightens makeup, and helps clients choose four or five outfits to be photographed in. Women may bring with them a special dress or negligee or choose some outfits off the rack at the studio-perhaps beginning with a relatively conservative spa-ghetti-strapped gown and ending the session in a feathered Playboy-style teddy complete with fish-net hose. Most anything goes except nude, the two owners, who are in their mid-thirties, say. “And it’s important to us not to do anything we consider distasteful or lewd.”

Using specially placed lighting, small electric fans for that wind-blown look, and lots of encouraging adjectives, Potter and Fletcher use flattery to relax clients who would normally be tense in front of a camera-especially in little more than a lace shawl.

The portraits are most popular as gifts from wives to husbands, but many of their customers, Fletcher says, are struggling with the plummeting self-esteem that so often comes postpartum or post-divorce. These women like the sexy photographs, she says, because they’re reminders of how attractive they really can be.

One woman comes in weekly and pays $20 toward the price of the sitting fee and portraits she will reward herself with when she reaches a specific weight goal. They’ve photographed at least one grandmother in lingerie and one 200-pound-plus woman who initially wanted to wear only a feather boa. Recently, Potter shot twelve different eight-by-tens of a woman who wanted to surprise her husband with his own personal calendar girl.

Fletcher and Potter call what they do “glamour photography.” Their landlady warned them about putting “boudoir photography” on their sign; “this is Fort Worth,” she said. Although Fletcher and Potter worked through the spring cleaning houses to help pay the bills, the two are optimistic that the popularity of their business will grow here as similar studios have on the West Coast. It’s hard to understand why it wouldn’t. Who wouldn’t enjoy skipping an aerobics class or a power lunch in favor of a couple of hours in something more comfortable?