About two and a half years ago, Beth Beard approached her friend Blake Morrow, a Toronto-based photographer and digital artist, about shooting some “before” photos of her. She was about to undergo gastric bypass surgery and wanted to be able to compare her body before and after the procedure.

Morrow was immediately enamoured with the idea of portraits that combined two versions of the same woman.

“I love before-and-after stuff,” Morrow tells Yahoo Canada.

Both photographer and subject wanted to avoid depressingly stereotypical shots — Beard didn’t want your typical badly lit “before” shots compared with well-lit and well-edited “after” shots — but instead, wanted to focus on celebrating change.

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Once Morrow suggested they use pop-culture-inspired characters to tell her transformation story, everything started to come together.

Two weeks before Beard’s surgery, Morrow got her in the studio and shot 12 “before” characters in their respective scenes.

“Basically Beth had to project interacting with this ‘after’ self, not knowing what the results would be,” Morrow says.

Morrow praises his subject, who is also a photographer, for her willingness to “go there.”

“Some of the images are not flattering,” he says. “In the ‘before,’ she has a lot of courage, letting us show this.”

He says that while his friendship with Beard was helpful in establishing complete trust on set, Beard “being someone who knows how to work a camera and is a photographer…helped a lot.”

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“And because of her theatre background, she’s okay with people looking at her. She’s okay with being a subject. So she brought a lot to the shoot,” he says.

After Beard’s gastric bypass surgery, the friends then waited a whole two years before revisiting the scenarios.

“I would say it was both scary and motivating,” Beard tells Yahoo Canadaabout the pressure to look great in the “after” photos.

“I learned a lot about gastric bypass in the sense that maybe a decade ago I thought it was a quick fix, and had no idea,” Morrow admits, listing the significant lifestyle changes he witnessed in Beard after her surgery. “I have a lot of respect for it. I’m hoping that when people find out the gastric bypass part, they’re able to learn more about it somehow.“

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