About Lolos Boudoir
Lolo's Boudoir is a photography studio in Sausalito, San Francisco, Marin, Bay Area, that specializes in sensual intimate fine art boudoir photography for women. Lone Schneider's photography and photographs celebrate women's ageless inner and outer beauty. Photo sessions are tailored to each of her clients. Lone Mørch Schneider says her business, Lolo's Boudoir (www.lolosboudoir.com) serves women, couples, maternity, and mother and child portraits, and has grown so much in the last year that she's now seeing clients in New York and Los Angeles and Europe and the rest of the USA.
Her clients -- many of them women with average bodies, average love lives and the usual body hang-ups -- say posing in lacy lingerie, fishnets and garters or nothing at all is a new way to challenge themselves, even if the retro styling sometimes makes them startled to see their mothers staring back at them, and even when their more repressed selves kick back in after they get home. Lolo’s Boudoir delivers beyond photography as it marks a transition of empowerment for her clients who embrace their sense of self and sensuality.
Photo play, beauty and the boudoir feeling liberated through a lens. Sylvia Rubin, Chronicle Fashion editor. To commemorate her 39th last week, Gabel, who is single, successful and (clearly) a bit of a thrill seeker, signed up with Sausalito photographer Lone Morch Schneider for a session of boudoir photography, an old genre in the midst of a revival. Boudoir photography is nothing new, of course. Any search of a flea market snapshot bin unearths tiny black and white pictures of Victorian-era women in their corsets. But it seems that this niche, which waxes and wanes, is back in favor again. Many of Schneider's clients come to her when they are in transition, she said. "Maybe they've had cancer, or just made a very big change in their personal lives.'' Many tell her it's a way of putting themselves out there, of addressing their own notions of sensuality and body image. Think of it as the equivalent of a very fast little car. A sexy treat, a luxurious indulgence.
Lone Schneider photographs on location and in studio. Her Sausalito-based studio is set up in a barnlike storage shed next to her house, is like something out of "Desperate Housewives'' -- colorful, flamboyant, sexy, playful, a bit over the top. There's a big bed with a merlot silk coverlet and silk pillows, complete with yards of white mosquito netting rigged up to a pulley suspended from the ceiling. Next to the bed, she's re-created a romantic dressing room set with an Art Deco vanity table and needlepoint chair; upstairs, she's still putting together what she calls her Arabian Nights set, with a faux fur ottoman and pastel silk curtains.
Schneider, 38, and married, is a self-taught photographer. She began her own career about four years ago after having her own boudoir portraits taken by a friend as a gift to her husband. "It was inspiring to be sexy and show off like that,'' she says. Photography came easily to her. Quickly she learned that she could make pretty pictures and had a knack for making her subjects comfortable. "I want my client to be in touch with the feeling that she's a sensual being all the time, not only when she has a partner,'' she says. Her clients tend to be professional women like Gabel (the skydiving mortgage worker), ranging in age from the dewy 20s to middle-aged, who can afford the $500 to $750 fee for the shoots.
Gabel said Schneider helped her tap into personalities she didn't know she had. "I don't really wear garters and fishnets, that whole getup,'' she said, "but I put them on, and after a couple of hours of shooting, it felt like we were just girlfriends hanging out.''
What strikes Schneider about the women who come to her is that that they do this for themselves rather than for a significant other. "Even if they are doing it for a lover, they're still, deep down, doing it for themselves,'' she says. "This was just for me,'' says Gabel, who is between boyfriends at the moment.
Client Erika Lind, who is in her mid-30s, recently spent a chilly winter morning there "frolicking about the forest,'' she wrote in an online review of the business.
"I played the role of nymph, drama queen and even bathing beauty as I shed all and luxuriated in the freezing cold stream water,'' she wrote. "At that moment I felt I had experienced a 'creative baptism' of sorts.''
