NASHVILLE, Tenn. - It doesn't sound like a moving, potentially life-changing experience: Take someone's picture and give it to her.
But small groups of photographers taking portraits around the world as part of Saturday's Help Portrait have found the simple act can be profoundly meaningful to some of their subjects, who are recruited from places like battered women's shelters and halfway houses.
"That's the new me. Oh yeah," Amy Hailey says as she shows off a framed portrait at a Help Portrait event in Nashville.
Hailey, 48, is a recovering drug addict and alcoholic. She says she has been clean for six months.
"Before I was avoiding having my picture taken," she says. "I was in a hole."
Hailey tears up as she recounts being abused as a child, which she says led her to begin drinking at age 12. After her father died in April and her mother's home was flooded in May, she considered suicide. Instead, she called Magdalene House, a residential recovery program for women that she had read about in the newspaper.
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At the Saturday event, Hailey says she has transformed in the past half year.
The picture is proof. In a burnt-orange knit top and a dark blazer jacket, with a small cross around her neck, she looks confident and serious. "I look like an FBI agent!" she says, joking.
Help Portrait was started by Nashville photographer Jeremy Cowart, who says he hoped to counter the commercialism of the Christmas season with a project that was all about giving. The first global event in 2009 drew photographers from 42 countries who set up more than 500 local events. This year is even bigger, with 60 countries participating and events in all 50 states.
At Saturday's event in Nashville, Brandy Readnour said she plans to give her picture to her 13-year-old daughter when the teen comes for a visit today.
Readnour, 32, is in a recovery program called Hope Center after a 17-year drug addiction, and she hasn't seen her daughter for months.
Readnour found her way to the center after two suicide attempts in October put her in a mental health facility. Her marriage had fallen apart, and she was homeless. Her children, ages 17, 13 and 12, were living with her mother.
"My kids wouldn't talk to me," she says. "My mom wouldn't let me stay with her. I could come and eat, but I had to leave right after." Looking at her picture, she says, "It's like the new change in my life - the beginning of a new start, actually."
Jennifer Clinger says she was just getting out of jail at this time last year.
"My daughter sent me my mug shot," she says. "My face was all swollen up. ... I looked like Quasimodo."
Contrast that to the Jennifer Clinger of Saturday. She's been clean for almost nine months, and it's hard for her to imagine she spent 33 years addicted to heroin and prescription drugs.
The 45-year-old's face glows as she talks of her new beginning while a makeup artist applies bright red, shimmering lipstick to match her red, fuzzy sweater.
"It's wonderful, wonderful," she says of having her picture made. "People do care. I thought nobody did."
Clinger has three grown children who were raised by her parents and sister. She will give her pictures to her children as a Christmas gift, she says.
"They don't have any pictures of me, not a good picture," she says.
Jenny Muckala, a friend of Cowart's, helped organize the event in Nashville. She says she didn't know what to expect when she volunteered to help last year, but she didn't think she would be moved to tears.
"There are so many programs to meet people's physical needs, and this is something that's not obvious, right?" she said. "But people look and say, 'I didn't know I could look like that' or 'I didn't know I was worth looking at.' ... It's such a small thing and so unexpectedly important."
