Stripped Away: Portraits Shaped by the Stories Behind Them

By Dennis M. Hecht | Founder, Hecht Media & Main Event Pros

There are things we say about people after they're gone that we should've found a way to tell them while they were still here.

That thought has been following me for a while. As the 25th anniversary of September 11 approached, I found myself thinking about mortality more than I had in recent years. Growing up in New York City, 9/11 is inseparable from my own story. I was a high school student in Manhattan that morning, close enough to the World Trade Center that the City of New York recognizes me as a 9/11 survivor. Twenty-five years is a strange milestone. It's long enough for something that still feels vivid to become history to an entire generation of people who weren't alive to experience it.

At the same time, there seemed to be reminder after reminder that the people we associate with different chapters of our lives don't remain frozen there. Musicians, performers, wrestlers, and other public figures whose work had been part of my world were suddenly being discussed in the past tense. The losses of people like New Found Glory guitarist Chad Gilbert, PAC, who many wrestling fans also knew from his WWE years, and Andy Williams, The Butcher in AEW and guitarist for Every Time I Die, landed differently against the backdrop of that anniversary. These were people with public personas, careers, accomplishments, fans, photographs, interviews, and enormous bodies of work.

And yet, eventually, as it does for all of us, the conversation becomes about who they were. It made me think about how often the most beautiful things we say about someone are said when they're no longer in the room to hear them.

That idea eventually became one of the foundations of Stripped Away.

The things we wait too long to say

Years ago, the husband of a very good friend asked me to write her eulogy. He's one of my closest friends, and she was someone whose presence had been part of an important chapter of my life. Sitting down to write about her forced me to find language for all the qualities, memories, and little things that made her matter.

I remember thinking how strange it was that death suddenly gave us permission to say things that might've felt awkward while someone was alive. Why should telling someone what they mean to us feel uncomfortable? Why can we stand in front of a room after someone dies and describe their kindness, humor, strength, influence, contradictions, quirks, and impact with complete sincerity, but struggle to look that same person in the eyes beforehand and tell them any of it?

That thought stayed with me because friendship itself has been complicated in my life.

Some of the people I loved most when I was younger were people I made music with. We had a band that took different forms over the years, and like a lot of young friendships built around something creative, the music and the relationships became intertwined. Eventually, those friendships fractured.

For a long time, I carried bitterness about it. Two friends remained close with one another while I felt as though I'd been left behind. At the time, I interpreted that as proof of something much larger. I thought it meant I hadn't mattered as much as they'd mattered to me. I'd invested so much of myself in those friendships and in the music we were making that losing them felt less like people drifting apart and more like abandonment.

When you're hurting, it's very easy to turn absence into an explanation. They stopped calling, so I must not have mattered. They remained close, so I must've been disposable. The friendship ended, so everything that came before it must've meant more to me than it did to them. Those conclusions felt true because the emotions behind them were real, but emotion and complete understanding aren't always the same thing.

Years later, around the beginning of the COVID era, those friendships gradually came back into my life. One conversation led to another, and eventually the friend I'd been most stubborn about reconnecting with was back too. There wasn't some dramatic movie scene where everyone explained twenty years of grievances. We just started talking again, and somehow so much of what had once felt enormous became smaller.

Not meaningless. Not erased. There are still moments when I remember why I was hurt. But time and conversation gave me access to something I hadn't possessed when I was younger: perspective.

I realized I'd spent years carrying a complete story about what other people's actions meant without ever actually possessing all of their chapters.

That lesson would eventually become extraordinarily important to me as a photographer.

I've spent much of my life listening to people

Long before Stripped Away, listening was at the center of much of what I did. In healthcare, I worked closely with professionals from around the world who were leaving everything familiar behind to begin new lives and careers in the United States. People trusted me with fears they didn't always know how to express, questions they were embarrassed to ask, ambitions for their families, frustrations, uncertainty, and enormous hopes for what their lives might become.

I learned that the obvious part of someone's story is rarely the whole story.

Later, as my work expanded into marketing, filmmaking, photography, and consulting, I continued using many of those same instincts. Whether I was trying to understand what a hospital needed, helping an organization communicate its mission, interviewing someone for a film, or helping a business identify what made its brand meaningful, the work always became better when I stopped thinking about what I wanted to say and started listening for what the other person was actually trying to communicate.

Main Event Pros eventually gave me another outlet for that part of myself. It started in professional wrestling, but increasingly I found myself less interested in simply documenting what someone did and more interested in understanding who they were when the performance stopped.

That's where Stripped Away began, although at first, I didn't really know that's what I was creating.

The project started almost by accident

The earliest portraits weren't accompanied by long conversations. I was already photographing people, particularly professional wrestlers, and I began creating intimate black-and-white portraits alongside some of those shoots. I liked what removing the color did. Wrestling can be extraordinarily visual, with bright gear, elaborate characters, promotional graphics, stage lighting, and larger-than-life personalities. Black and white removed some of that information.

Suddenly, I was paying more attention to expressions, eyes, lines in a face, posture, confidence, fatigue, uncertainty, and the quieter things that could disappear beneath the spectacle.

I began posting some of those portraits with short stories about the people in them. I wrote what I knew about them, their accomplishments, pieces of their backgrounds, and things I'd learned through knowing and photographing them. The intention was good, but the more I did it, the more uncomfortable I became with one fundamental assumption.

Who was I to decide what someone's story was?

Knowing someone doesn't give me ownership of their story. Photographing someone certainly doesn't. Even caring deeply about someone doesn't mean I understand all the experiences that shaped them.

I realized I was doing something I'd experienced myself years earlier. I was filling in the spaces. I was looking at what I knew and constructing the rest of the person around it.

Once I recognized that, Stripped Away changed.

If these portraits were really going to be shaped by the stories behind the people in them, then those people needed to tell me what the story was.

My job needed to become listening.

One conversation. One portrait.

Today, Stripped Away begins with a conversation. There's no elaborate production meeting, and there isn't a questionnaire designed to manufacture vulnerability. I'm not looking for the most traumatic thing that's ever happened to someone, and I have no interest in turning people's pain into content.

We sit down, and I bring a notebook. An actual notebook. Usually, it's one of those inexpensive black-and-white marble composition books most of us have seen since elementary school. There's no laptop glowing between us, no constant checking of a phone, and no screen demanding our attention. It's just paper, another human being, and my Pilot Precise V5 extra-fine rolling ball pen, which has somehow become an essential piece of Stripped Away equipment.

Pilot, if you're reading this, I accept pens.

There's something genuinely important to me about how simple the process is. Our lives have become saturated with technology. We photograph everything, record everything, post everything, and measure everything. We have access to more information about one another than any generation before us, and somehow I'm not convinced we understand one another any better.

For these conversations, I want less technology, not more. I want to sit across from someone and pay attention.

Sometimes we talk about childhood or family. Sometimes it's wrestling, music, art, work, faith, failure, illness, success, relationships, identity, fear, or ambition. And sometimes we talk about something completely ordinary.

Those moments have taught me something too. The things we consider mundane can reveal an enormous amount about a person. It might be the way someone talks about their grandfather, the first job they remember, a hobby nobody associates with them, the neighborhood where they grew up, a teacher who believed in them, a stupid joke they still remember twenty years later, the food their mother made, or what they wanted to be when they were eight years old.

The ordinary details are often the foundation beneath the extraordinary ones.

So I listen, I write, and eventually, I make a portrait.

The portrait comes after the person

The photograph is still enormously important to me. I'm a photographer. Light matters. Composition matters. Expression matters. Every technical decision I've spent thousands of hours learning still matters.

But Stripped Away has changed what I believe the photograph is supposed to accomplish.

I'm not trying to make somebody look tough or important. I'm not trying to impose a character on them or create the version of them that I think will perform best on social media. I'm trying to create something informed by what just happened between us.

Sometimes the portrait is confident. Sometimes it's uncomfortable. Sometimes it's warm. Sometimes it's guarded. Sometimes there's strength in it, and sometimes the strength comes from allowing vulnerability to exist.

The conversation doesn't dictate some literal pose. Someone can tell me something heartbreaking without the resulting portrait needing to look sad. What changes is my understanding of the person standing in front of me, and understanding changes the way I photograph someone.

That's why the series is called Stripped Away: Portraits Shaped by the Stories Behind Them.

We're removing some of the performance, but not all of it. I don't believe there's a magical, singular "real version" of any person hiding underneath everything else. A wrestler's character can be real. A musician onstage can be real. A business leader at work can be real. The parent who comes home afterward can be equally real.

Human beings contain contradictions. That's what makes us interesting.

Stripped Away simply creates room for some of the versions of a person that don't always get photographed.

There have been a lot of tears

Something unexpected started happening as the conversations became deeper. People cried. Not everyone, but more often than I expected.

Sometimes the tears came while talking about something painful. Sometimes they appeared while talking about someone they loved. Sometimes they came from remembering how far they'd traveled or realizing that they'd never actually spoken certain thoughts aloud before. I've cried during conversations too, and I don't consider that a failure of professionalism. I consider it evidence that two human beings were present.

But I want to be very clear about something: the goal of Stripped Away isn't to make anyone cry.

I don't push people toward trauma. I don't believe pain automatically makes someone's story more interesting, and I don't want anyone walking into this project believing they need to reveal the most private experience of their life in exchange for a photograph. They control their story. They decide what they want to share and where the boundaries are. My responsibility is to respect them.

One participant described the experience afterward as "a therapy session plus photos."

That stopped me in my tracks.

I'm not a therapist, and I'd never present Stripped Away as therapy. But I understood what she meant. Someone had sat across from her and listened, not while preparing the next response, not while scrolling, not because there was something to sell her, and not because the conversation needed to lead to a transaction.

Just listening.

The fact that someone could experience that as meaningful enough to describe it that way affected me deeply. It also made me realize how rare undivided attention has become.

Nothing to sell

When I began inviting people to participate in Stripped Away, I wanted the language to be as simple as the project itself:

One conversation. One portrait. Nothing to sell.

I'm looking for people with a story worth telling, and there's no cost to participate. That matters to me because I don't want the project limited to people who can afford a particular photography package. I also don't want the conversation shaped by a transaction.

Stripped Away feeds a part of me that commercial work can't always reach. Hecht Media allows me to work strategically with businesses and organizations. I love helping clients solve communication problems, build stronger brands, create films, develop imagery, and produce media that has a purpose. Main Event Pros introduced me to an entirely different creative world of wrestlers, performers, musicians, artists, and people building public identities around what they love.

Stripped Away sits somewhere alongside both of them while belonging completely to neither.

There's no pitch at the end. There's nothing I'm trying to upsell.

The point is the person.

That's it.

Saying the good things while people are still here

The longer I work on this project, the more I return to the thought that helped inspire it. We wait too long to say things.

We save some of our most thoughtful language for funerals, memorial posts, anniversaries, tributes, and eulogies. We tell everyone except the person how much that person mattered.

I understand why. Being sincere can feel incredibly vulnerable. It can feel awkward to look at a friend and say, "You changed my life." It can feel strange to tell someone, "I admire this about you." It can almost feel socially inappropriate to explain in detail why another human being matters to us unless circumstances have somehow given us permission.

Death gives us that permission immediately.

I don't think we should wait for it.

Part of what I want Stripped Away to accomplish is giving people an opportunity to hear good things while they're still very much alive. Sometimes that comes from me. Sometimes it comes from their own realization during the conversation. And sometimes it comes later, when somebody reads their story and understands them differently.

There's another side to that mission too. I want people to understand one another better.

A public identity gives us only fragments. A wrestling character is a fragment. A musician onstage is a fragment. A corporate title is a fragment. An Instagram account is a fragment. Even the people closest to us only know certain chapters.

I've learned that lesson in my own life. I spent years believing I understood why friendships had ended. I carried anger, abandonment, and conclusions based on the information available to me at the time. Reconnecting didn't erase everything that happened, but conversation complicated the story.

And complicated stories are usually more truthful stories.

People deserve that complexity.

I don't want to tell someone's story for them anymore

Perhaps the biggest change Stripped Away has created in me is recognizing the limits of my own perspective.

A photographer has an enormous amount of control. I choose the frame, the moment, and which photograph gets seen. If I'm also writing about the subject, I can choose the words people encounter alongside their face. That's a tremendous amount of authorship over somebody else's representation, and I've become increasingly uncomfortable treating that casually.

I don't want to look at someone, gather a few facts, and decide I understand them. I want them involved. I want to hear the foundation of the story before I decide which parts might matter. Sometimes what they tell me changes everything I thought I knew.

That's one of the greatest gifts this project has given me.

Every conversation reminds me that the person sitting across from me contains an entire life I can't see. So does the cashier. So does the wrestler. So does the CEO. So does the person arguing with you online. So does the friend who stopped calling. So does the person you think you've completely figured out.

We walk around carrying entire worlds inside us while everyone else sees the exterior.

Photography taught me to observe that exterior carefully.

Stripped Away is teaching me to ask permission to go deeper.

Where Stripped Away goes from here

As of October 2026, I'm still looking for people who want to participate. Professional wrestlers were part of the beginning, but this project isn't limited to wrestling. I'm interested in artists, musicians, performers, leaders, athletes, business owners, creators, people who've overcome something, people still working through something, and people who simply have an experience or perspective worth understanding.

That last category is intentionally broad.

You don't need to be famous. You don't need an enormous following. You don't need a dramatic tragedy or a résumé full of accomplishments. You don't need to convince me that you're interesting enough.

You're a person.

That's usually enough to start a conversation.

Participation remains at no cost. One conversation. One portrait. Nothing to sell.

If you're interested in being featured in Stripped Away: Portraits Shaped by the Stories Behind Them, you can reach me through @MainEventPros or @HechtMedia on Instagram, email hello@hechtmedia.com, or visit HechtMedia.com.

I don't know exactly where this project will lead, and for once, I'm comfortable with that. I'm learning something from every person who sits across from me. I'm learning about differences I never would've understood from the outside and similarities I never would've expected to find. I'm learning how much exists inside the parts of our lives we dismiss as ordinary.

Mostly, I'm being reminded how important it is to simply be present with another person.

Maybe that's what I've been looking for all along.

Not another content strategy. Not another algorithm. Not another reason to stare at a screen.

A notebook. A pen. Two people. One conversation. One portrait.

And the chance to tell someone, while they're still here, that their story was worth hearing.