‹ Photo Notes · 19 září, 2018
For years, people have been asking what this „un-glamour“ thing is, and an American once told me that such a word (uglamour) doesn’t even exist. I told him I probably should know better since I invented it myself. Then someone from artistic circles suggested I write a manifest, a definition, because every style should be accompanied by one so people stop asking…
I’m not much into manifests, but I’ll try to share the story and meaning behind this peculiar term.
When I want to make a joke out of it, I say that I once wanted to shoot glamour, but I failed and kept coming up with uglamour instead. People always find this answer amusing, even though they don’t realize how close to the truth it actually is…
To explain the word uglamour better, I need to start with its root word: glamour.
What Is Glamour
Even though it is often pronounced the French way in our region (glamooer), the word glamour actually comes from Scotland. Its roots trace back to the medieval term gramarye—a word for higher learning and grammar that ordinary people didn’t understand, leading them to view it as magic, incantations, and spells. Over time, this evolved into both today’s standard grammar and, in Scots dialect, glamour, meaning enchantment, illusion, or deception. Scottish poet Allan Ramsay used the phrase cheating Glamour in 1721—which could easily be translated as a pretense of correctness or false correctness.
However, over time, the meaning settled on charm or loveliness.
What Is Glamour in My Eyes
Glamour photography, in my eyes, unfortunately means precisely that false charm—an illusion of correctness. Just to be clear: I have nothing against charm or photographing charm, but let’s admit where glamour has shifted and what is considered glamour today.
Contemporary glamour pretends to be luxury. The ideal combination looks something like this: in a luxurious lounge, on a luxurious sofa, sits or lies a luxurious model in luxurious lingerie, with luxurious makeup and luxurious hair. The photographer adds luxurious lighting and, finally, several hours of luxurious Photoshop. The result is one big illusion of luxury (a fraud). It is essentially a frozen ideal of the flashy 1980s (photography as a field generally has an incredible ability to freeze in time and cling to rules from 1950s textbooks, while music, film, and literature have gone through dozens of revolutions).
Yet, fashion and photography already tried to escape this sterile perfection once. In the nineties, a wave arrived (think of early Kate Moss or Corinne Day‚s photos) that swept away over-polished supermodels and put civility, paleness, messy hair, and ordinary environments on display. There was raw authenticity in it. But today’s standard glamour has completely forgotten that and returned to the sterile laboratory where every flaw is considered a mistake. A twisted strap, imperfect skin, flawed makeup, a stray lock of hair, a little bump here and a fold there, a smudge on the couch, an inappropriate combination of shoes and wallpaper… You made a mistake!
Endless retouching. If the photographer doesn’t have all the mentioned ingredients in perfect condition—which they don’t, let’s admit it—retouching steps in. In fact, it is widely accepted that retouching inherently belongs to this genre; if you don’t retouch, you can’t shoot glamour. Glamour means charm (synonymous with beauty), so there’s no room for flaws here.
The photographer zooms in on a detail of the face, spots an imperfection in the skin or in their own work with light and shadows, and fixes it in a second. But right next to it, they spot another one. And another. Once the face is perfectly retouched, they notice that the (naturally looking) neck needs a little tweaking to be as perfect as the face. Hands, legs, bottom follow…
On the couch sits a perfect wax figure, but the couch has a scuffed leg. There’s a scratch on the floor and a smudge on the wall…
They fix everything, and if they forget a single detail, everyone points it out. You made a mistake!
The result of typical glamour is a photo that is pretty, but not believable. And often devoid of soul, content, story, or mood… just tinsel. Just „look at what a pretty girl this is.“ And nicely, laboriously retouched… Boy, can they retouch!
And do you know where these glamour photos usually hang? In the bathroom or inside a locker door next to Maradona and a Lamborghini.
…and that is exactly everything I never wanted.
What Is Uglamour
I have one fundamental priority: my work has to make sense to me. My life, my relationships, my fun, everything… Even some seemingly nonsense things must make sense. Without sense, only nonsense remains, and if something is nonsense, I have to fix it or change it.
I can no longer answer when I used the word uglamour for the first time. It’s been many years and I don’t even know where or how it happened. All I know is that it was irony and exaggeration, perhaps among photographer friends at a bar (quite likely at the Heřmanka bar in Letná), when we were discussing photography and I said that I don’t shoot glamour, but uglamour.
Back then everyone laughed, but it caught on and the term began to spread. After a while, I started using it myself as the official designation for my work. And soon others started adopting it too. FotoŠkoda now hosts some of my Uglamour Photography workshops, Alien Skin (the manufacturer of the globally popular Exposure plugin) writes about my Uglamour style, and I meet photographers who identify with uglamour.
Uglamour = ugly + glamour
Yes, the whole thing came from combining ugly and glamour. That’s also where the pronunciation comes from, so it’s not juglæmr or anglæmr, but aglæmr… A once non-existent word like uglamour can now even be read aloud by Google Translate. The funny thing is that the English pronunciation is exactly as intended, while Czech naturally turned it into a nice aglamour.
*Edit 2026: Google is back to reading it incorrectly as juglæmr and translates it as ugly… silly thing 🙂
Uglamour is natural, believable glamour
Despite the name, uglamour doesn’t mean I shoot or want to shoot ugly photos. It is essentially the photographic equivalent of the Japanese wabi-sabi—finding beauty in imperfection, rawness, asymmetry, and what time or life has left behind. Uglamour, in my concept, means natural and believable glamour without pretense.
More an Approach Than a Style
It’s not so much about how the photo looks, but how I approach it.
Of course, I work with many elements of glamour. My models are beautiful, but natural. The environment I photograph them in is also natural. I approach photography as if it were a single frozen frame from a feature film. The best frame, of course. The most interesting one. In a film, people aren’t just beautiful, perpetually happy, and erotically tuned with perfect makeup in a perfect environment with flawless facial lighting. In a film, we see a spectrum of moods, states, human joys, and dramas. That is what classic glamour doesn’t allow me to capture—there’s no room for imperfection. Yet imperfection is so fascinating.
Technically, uglamour allows me to focus much more on the model, the situation, the mood, the story… I waste practically no time on technicalities, neither during the shoot nor after. I light simply, but in a way that avoids having to fix bad shadows later. Even though I don’t work with makeup artists, I don’t retouch faces. I like the models as they are, and hardly anyone ever says they look ugly in my photos.
The more civil and natural I keep the photos, the more freedom I gain. When a model arrives with a scraped knee, I either shoot without showing her legs, or we shoot a scene where she has a scraped knee. But that can’t be glamour—it has to be that film, a story, a mood.
I can shoot any craziness I want—something glamour practically forbids. But people are crazy sometimes. Men put on stockings, women aren’t always seriously sexy either—they too have moments where they throw on something wild and want to act out for a bit. It’s part of human fun.
Even Uglamour Photos Lie
Uglamour builds on naturalness and believability, but that doesn’t mean I don’t create illusions. I don’t need Photoshop for that, though; I handle those things directly during the shoot, most often using light, shadow, cropping, or other simple tricks. Here are a few simple and, for the moment, fictional examples:
Does the model have a scarred right cheek? I photograph her from the left side or veil her right cheek in shadow, hair, or otherwise. Why retouch right away?
Does a part of the body look too heavy? Shadows, a different camera angle, or an overall different shot will help me again.
The environment: I shoot anywhere—my most common workplaces are hotel rooms, bathrooms, hallways, run-down houses… I accept the environment as it is. In a shabby environment, the beauty of a model stands out nicely, but she must fit into it with her naturalness. With glamour makeup, in glamour lingerie, and with glamour poses and expressions, the result would be embarrassing and hardly believable. When I do need to hide or tone something down in that environment, I do it again with light/shadow or cropping.
Most of the work is done (very simply) directly on set and in-camera. After the shoot, picking the photo takes up most of my time, while the actual editing takes only a few minutes and is done globally. And because I don’t retouch, nobody ever says, You made a mistake! I intentionally leave all the mistakes in (which I don’t consider mistakes, anyway). From a glamour perspective, there are so many that the viewer has two choices: either it’s not glamour enough for them, or they say, Interesting style.
When you add it all up, you realize that…
Uglamour Is Freedom
I shoot what I want and how I want; I’m bound only by my own limits. Quite naturally, some people don’t like my photos at all, while others do. Not every model wants to shoot with me, and I don’t want to shoot with every model. That’s fine—it acts as a pre-filter, and the ones who do come are fantastic. They trust me that they will look naturally beautiful in my photos. And they don’t micromanage my selection of shots.
It’s similar with clients. Nobody asks me to shoot in this or that style; either they don’t like what I do and don’t contact me, or they do and give me maximum trust and freedom. I shoot according to my vision and select the photos myself. Clients don’t demand retouches either. They expect to receive exactly the kind of photos they chose me for—naturally and believably beautiful from both their perspective and mine.
Likewise, someone who doesn’t like my photos is hardly going to attend my workshop. And those who do like them usually return, because they realize my uglamour approach is actually very close to their heart.
A photo, like any work of art, is a reflection of its author. You are glamour, you shoot glamour. You are uglamour, you shoot uglamour.
Uglamour photos don’t tend to be cheap posters for a garage or a locker door. They find their place framed on the walls of people who look for depth, raw authenticity, and a story in art instead of superficial polish. For an artist, there is no greater reward than seeing their work live in the interiors of people who understand it.
So that’s roughly what uglamour is… and that I made it all up? Everything was made up by someone in the beginning…
Have a nice evening, J.