ART & MIND

Jamie Love expands her Newfield photography business to include somatic therapy

By Jaime Cone

Longtime local photographer Jamie Love has been serving the Tompkins County area for years, infusing life into the stereotypically stu y genre of corporate headshots, and breathing character into personal branding for company websites.

Love has been honing her cra for about 20 years and has been working out of her home studio in New eld since she moved there in 2014 — though much of her photography is done outdoors on the rural land she describes as her own “slice of heaven.”

Over the years, she started to notice a trend in the responses she received from clients.

“Part of the feedback I get is that they say to me they’ve never gotten a headshot quite like this — ‘this was a transformative experience for me.’

“I started noticing how I was organically integrating [mental health work] into my photography sessions with people,” Love added. As a speci c example, she said that when clients had the all-too-common problem of freezing up under the camera she would guide them through ways to get their body to settle down so they could be more present, which inevitably resulted in a better picture.

Another time, a woman who just had a double mastectomy came to Love for a portrait that would honor the current time in her life and help her work through her recent trauma. is all makes sense when you know that Love has her undergraduate degree in psychology and is currently furthering her education in that area.

Combining her two loves, photography and psychology, came second nature to her, she said, but it wasn’t until she began pursuing her master’s degree in mental health counseling that she got a clear picture of how the two could t together as a speci c type of therapy.

“I never had it listed as a service,” she said, “but just this past year my psychology supervisor said I should start o ering this out to the community as a service… so far, the response has been great.”

She decided to call the new business Elevated Alchemy, and in her psychologist role she o en does narrative work, helping her client to rewrite their story through the photographs. Someone who went through a traumatic event in childhood might take a fairytale scene they associate with that time in their life and recreate it with the client starring in a more empowering role, Love explained. “It could be for anybody in any situation in life,” she said. “You don’t have to be a trauma survivor to do something like this. Maybe you’re coming into a newer part of who you are as an adult… life transformations — we don’t honor them, necessarily, and what I could say is that this is accessible for anybody who wanted to mark a time in their life where they want to feel honored.” Just as she thought, taking photos and mental health work were a natural pairing. “ ey are intrinsically linked,” Love said. “ ere is so much psychology behind a portrait.” Love calls the work she does with these clients somatic work. She explained that “soma” means body, so in psychology somatic work is a practice of the body and mind and learning how to be in your body and reintegrate parts of yourself in a new way. It can involve di erent movement practices and body scans, allowing people to gain insight into what is happening in their nervous system and helping them to befriend their body again. ough many therapists use somatic work in their sessions, Love said she is not aware of other counselors who use photography in the way she does.

“I am trying to invent something new for myself because I don’t think it exists, at least around here, to my knowledge,” she said. “Just the portrait session itself — that alone is transformative. e photos are the icing on the cake.”

To view some of the resulting images, visit Love’s Instagram at instagram.com/jamielovephotography. To learn more about Elevated Alchemy, visit elevated alchemy.life.

Jamie Love has introduced somatic therapy to her photography offerings. (Photo: Provided) Examples of photos by Jamie Love. Arts & Entertainment