Ellen Fisher Turk spent twenty years in the field of special education. Working with people with learning disabilities forced her to discover how to help people learn outside the traditional ways. During this time, she also got involved in documentary filmmaking and photography. In 1996, a friend who was a survivor of rape asked Ellen to photographer her. Since the woman’s attack, she had major body issues and wanted the photographs to help her see herself in a different light.

After seeing what power this had on her friend, Ellen has used this technique with over a hundred women suffering from things like eating disorders to sexual abuse. Because they are so preoccupied with food and their bodies, women suffering from eating disorders cannot see how thin they have actually become. They have a tendency to separate their bodies into pieces like fat thighs or flabby arms. Even if they are emaciated, they may still perceive themselves as over weight.

With the photo therapy, as Ellen says, "It’s like an amazing switch turns on in their minds. It’s my intention to lend them my eyes so they can see something they haven’t seen their whole lives." Or the person they forgot.

Very often, a counselor sends the women to Ellen when other forms of therapy haven’t been successful. But it isn’t about just taking pictures of a woman. Ellen takes time getting to know each woman, her concerns and fears, through a journal they are required to keep to express their experiences of being photographed nude. It is after getting to know the women that Ellen can accurately represent them in pictures.

One of the women photographed by Ellen was finally able to see herself without being blinded by the trauma of incest she had experienced. "Well a funny thing happened when I saw myself in those pictures. I saw a beautiful, sad, complicated, courageous woman. I realized the worst was really not so bad. There was nothing wrong with me. I didn’t look like a "Playboy" centerfold but I didn’t care. For the first time I had sympathy for this somewhat tragic girl staring at me in all her naked vulnerable beauty," says Sarah.

Once the photographs are taken, Ellen goes over them with the woman, possibly highlighting the photos that she likes best. But the woman also examines the photos separately and with her therapist to rediscover how she sees herself.

This method of self-discovery has been helpful for numerous women to see how skinny they have truly become or find beauty in themselves that they have been ignoring.

For most people with body image problems, it isn’t about being overweight or ugly, it is about fear. Sometimes it takes doing the one thing that scares women the most - completely exposing themselves in front of the camera - that is the first step in learning to love their bodies, and in turn themselves, again.