The Weight of the Wall

The brick feels rough against my shoulder blades, the kind of grit that’s supposed to look industrial-chic in a headshot but mostly just feels like it’s snagging my favorite linen shirt. My friend Sarah is holding her mirrorless camera with the intensity of a sniper. “Just laugh,” she says. “Like I just told you something hilarious. Give me that authentic, approachable-expert energy.” I stare at her. My mind goes blank. Every joke I’ve ever heard evaporates. I end up baring my teeth in a way that suggests I might be undergoing a mild neurological event rather than enjoying a whimsical moment of entrepreneurship. It’s 92 degrees out, and I am failing at the one thing I’m supposed to be an expert in: being myself.

We are living in an era where small business owners are expected to be their own PR departments, creative directors, and lead actors. It isn’t enough to be a damn good accountant or a baker who understands the structural integrity of a sourdough boule. You have to look like the kind of person who has never had a flour-covered meltdown at 4:02 in the morning. The visual economy doesn’t just reward your labor; it rewards your ability to perform that labor with a specific, curated glow. If the glow is missing, the market assumes the skill is missing too. It’s a logical fallacy that has become a mandatory business expense.

The Contradiction of Commerce

Marcus R.-M. is the extreme version of a struggle we all have. We’re told that ‘people buy from people,’ which is true, but the version of ‘person’ they want to buy from is a highly filtered, sanitized iteration. They want the ‘you’ that has had eight hours of sleep and knows exactly where their car keys are. They don’t want the ‘you’ that just accidentally laughed at a funeral because the priest tripped over a flower arrangement and your brain chose the absolute worst moment to find physical comedy.

It was a sharp, barking sound that echoed through the chapel. It was authentic. It was human. It was also completely ‘off-brand’ for someone trying to project professional decorum.

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This is the tension: true humanity is messy, contradictory, and often poorly lit. But the market demands a ‘humanity’ that fits into a square grid. We are essentially being asked to stage-manage our souls. It creates a widening gap between being good at work and appearing good enough to deserve the work. I know 12 different freelancers who are world-class at what they do-designers who can solve a branding crisis in their sleep-who are currently paralyzed because they don’t have a ‘lifestyle’ photo of them drinking tea while looking pensively at a mood board. They feel like frauds because their real life involves messy desks and $22 sweatpants, not the minimalist aesthetic required by the algorithm.

The Expert vs. The Approachable Myth

When you’re a small business owner, the pressure to look approachable is often a direct contradiction to the pressure to look like an expert. Experts are supposed to be polished, untouchable, and slightly removed. ‘Approachable’ people are warm, vulnerable, and messy. Trying to occupy both spaces at once feels like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach while reciting the tax code in a foreign language. You end up looking stiff because you’re trying too hard to look relaxed. It’s a feedback loop of performative anxiety.

She came back with photos that looked like they belonged in a stock image library for ‘Successful Woman Drinking Water.’ They were beautiful. They were also completely hollow.

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This is where the standard advice fails. Most experts tell you to ‘just be yourself,’ which is about as helpful as telling a drowning person to ‘just breathe.’ What we actually need is permission to stop performing. We need to find the people who can see past the ‘approachable-expert’ mask and find the actual human underneath. This is a philosophy deeply embedded in the work of Morgan Bruneel Photography, where the goal isn’t to force you into a generic business template but to capture the version of you that actually exists when the ‘record’ light isn’t blinking. It’s about the difference between a costume and a character.

There’s a lesson in Marcus’s frustration. The ‘human’ element isn’t always a smile or a laugh on a brick wall. Sometimes, the most human thing about you is your competence, your obsession, or even your awkwardness. When we try to scrub away the weird parts of ourselves to fit the ‘business’ mold, we end up removing the very things that make us memorable. I think about my funeral laugh. It was a mistake, a glitch in my social software. But the three people who saw me do it and whispered, ‘Oh thank god, I thought I was the only one,’ are now the people I feel closest to.

If I could go back to that afternoon with Sarah and the brick wall, I’d stop trying to laugh. I’d probably just tell her about the funeral. I’d tell her about how I felt like a monster for finding a tripping priest funny, and she would have laughed, and then she would have hit the shutter. That would have been the photo. Not the ‘approachable expert,’ but the person who just said something true and felt a little lighter for it.

In the end, the visual economy is just another assembly line, and as Marcus would say, every assembly line has a bottleneck. The bottleneck in our industry isn’t a lack of ‘humanity’-it’s a surplus of performance. We are so busy trying to look like people that we’ve forgotten how to just be them. We don’t need more ‘curated’ warmth. We need more awkward laughs, more messy desks, and more refrigerated scalpels. We need to stop standing against the brick wall and just start doing the work. The rest-the trust, the connection, the ‘human’ part-tends to take care of itself when you’re not looking at the lens.