Kingston Photographer Berates Customers Who Paid Her Thousands Of Dollars To Develop Pictures, Blames Mental Health Despite Choosing To Live With Abusive Fiance
This is Emma Parsons, owner of Big Picture Photo Company in Kingston.
She’s been scamming customers out of thousands of dollars worth of pictures for the last year, giving excuse after excuse for why she can’t get the work done, and has even threatened to kill herself in order to make customers feel bad for her. Here’s one email I got:
I’m not the only one in this situation upon digging into it myself. Last year I had Big Picture Photo Co. out of Kingston MA (Emma Parsons) do pictures for me, my boyfriend and my dog in April. Everything went fantastic!! I paid her $500 in total for everything. I picked my print outs and she said they’d be ready shortly as she was backed up with COVID. Well August rolled around and I checked back in & she told me pretty much to screw off as her life was falling apart. Then nothing since. I tried reaching out in December and again in February! People have also tried emailing, Facebook messaging, she also disconnected her number. In December Venmo said she was still taking peoples $$ for photo shoots!! Please help!! Some people have had wedding photos done in the last 6 months those are pictures people can’t have redone & some even said they’re the last pictures they have of some people!! We’re talking $400+ from people who haven’t received an answer or refund. I really don’t know what else to do.
This is the email Emma sent the customer in August.
Pro tip – if you’re running a business, no one wants to hear about your white trash drama with your fiance. It’s unprofessional and puts the customer in an uncomfortable situation that isn’t fair to them. I also highly doubt you spent every weekend at a funeral, unless all your friends lived in Andrew Cuomo nursing homes. Your job is to give the clients what they asked for, which really isn’t that difficult to begin with.
She was indeed collecting payments from customers in December.
Here’s another customer:
I’ve paid a little more than $2000. Usually she makes you spend $1000 on prints before having the option to buy digital options, but she said she was so desperate this year, any money was a good thing. Normally all the digital are $3000 or something. I was making payments, but then she said she was taking a couple weeks off to recover and would be in touch. She hasn’t been in touch, and is actively ignoring all her customers. I don’t even care about getting them edited, I just want the pics.
I last talked to her in October, when she said her fiance had a bipolar episode and beat the shit out of her and broke her ribs. So, I paused my payments, and then my dog had some unexpected vet bills, so I waited to reach out to her. I’ve messaged her multiple times since Saturday, and she won’t read them, even though I can see that she’s been active on Facebook.
Here are the messages Emma sent the customer in October.
So she can’t get some pictures developed because her fiance Jimmy Traynor broke her ribs and nearly choked her to death and she’s single now? Don’t get me wrong, I feel bad for her if what she’s saying is true. But this is not the customer’s problem, and it’s wildly inappropriate that she’d share this information with them. What is the customer going to say? “I don’t care, just get me the pictures?” By throwing all this personal drama out of there she is intentionally putting the customer in a place where most normal people would feel bad asking to get the pictures they paid for. It’s also been more than 6 months, so it’s time to be a grownup, figure shit out, and fulfill your responsibilities.
Here’s all the receipts of payments this customer made to Emma Parsons on Venmo.
Today Emma finally responded in ALL CAPS with more of the usual whining about how hard her life is. In this message she attempts to weaponize suicide,
Oh good, she got back with the abuser who can’t get a job and help her avoid homelessness. This is somehow the customer’s problem.
I’ve had mental health issues that I was pretty open about recently. I know what it’s like to not be able to focus on your work because your mind is consumed with your problems and toxic people. The best thing you can do is talk to people about it, not use it as a crutch, and consume yourself with work.I started feeling better once I was able to become emotionally invested in the blog again, I identified things in my personal life that needed to be addressed, and I eliminated people from my life who helped caused these problems in the first place. But she’s not trying to get better, and she’s keeping the toxic people in her life. This is her choice.
Her fiance James Traynor is a real winner too. According to a story in The Patch he’s a “professional haunter.”
Great choice Emma.
She couldn’t respond to any of these customers on Facebook but she could update her page constantly with “feel bad for me because I might kill myself” posts.
As someone who has dealt with mental health issues personally, I’m initially sympathetic towards her. But using your mental health issues as a way to get avoid fulfilling contracted work obligations that have already been paid for is scummy, especially when you’ve been doing it since July. What’s even worse is weaponizing suicidal thoughts against customers in order to get them to stop asking you to do your job. The customers she’s doing this to were patient and offered help. It’s been almost a year. It’s no longer their problem.
This is America. There’s no reason a woman like this would be homeless with all the government programs readily at her disposal. She chooses to be with a man who’s kicking the shit out of her one day and getting engaged to her the next. She’s collecting money on Venmo from new customers and constantly posts on Facebook while ignoring the people who are asking her for the pictures they paid for. No sympathy.
Here’s what another customer said after paying Emma to take pictures of her dog over a year ago, who died this week.
We had pictures taken of two dogs. One was failing – Azi – we had a great day & the photos were incredible. She took them Feb 2020, she last communicated 1/28/21 with excuses. We had to put him to sleep yesterday. I really want to expose her since I am clearly not the only one. If you decide this story is worth telling. Here is one of her pics that she shared on Facebook after the shoot.
This is the email she sent that customer on January 28, once again whining about how hard her life is and why she couldn’t get the work done before the dog died.
You’re whining that you and your abusive boyfriend got kicked out of his Mom’s basement, and you want us to believe that his Mom “filed a false report” to get you kicked out. You want the customer to believe and care that you and the abusive boyfriend then got kicked out of his friend’s apartment for no reason, and that he lost his job because his boss had a “personal vendetta” against him. Same guy who allegedly broke her ribs and was the reason she couldn’t get work done in the first place. Almost as if there’s a pattern here, yet it’s never her fault. Emma and the abusive boyfriend are always the victim.
She claims in that email that she was kicked out of his friend’s apartment on New Years Eve, yet the day before that she was posting about her and James Traynor moving into a new apartment, having multiple dogs, and looking to buy more dogs from breeders.
Yea, she’s just a liar at this point.
On her business Facebook page she’s been whining about how this is the worst year of her life for 8 months and counting.
“I have to be given a break.”
It’s been 8 months. Your sympathy card has expired.
“Don’t bother me for anything at all for, I don’t know how long.”
That’s not how a business works dear. When I go into McDonald’s Grimace doesn’t tell me to wait 9 months to get my Big Mac because he caught his wife sleeping with the Hamburglar.
“Please respect that and I don’t need any rude, demanding, inconsiderate messages about a single damn thing right now.”
It’s been 7 months since this was posted. When can people start to be demanding? Also, the customer isn’t paying you to hear about the roller coaster you call life. You accepted their money to do a job and you haven’t done it. Shut up and get them their pictures.
Underneath these posts the comments are not going well for her.
She did get some initial support, but she chose to focus on the emails she got from customers who expected to get something in return for what they paid her.
Yea, that’s a shame and all, but this isn’t their problem.
Emma also previously owned a company called Dreaming in Dog Years Photo Company which got some free press and advertising from the local newspaper in 2015. Not sure what happened to that company, but I’m willing to bet she didn’t shut it down and start a new photography company because she didn’t like the name.
On her website for the new company Emma makes it seem like she’s a normal, hard working woman trying to make ends meet.
Hello art lover! My name is Emma Parsons and I am the photographer behind Big Picture Photo Co. Photography is not just my full time job but my passion and my life. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where my personal life ends and my work life begins, but that just means I am incredibly invested in my work
Actually, it’s not hard to tell where your personal life ends and your work life begins because you insist on combining those worlds. You’re definitely not invested in your work because you’ve had months to get some simple pictures developed and you’ve failed to do it. You also don’t have any kids, so the only person you have to take care of is yourself. Meanwhile most of your customers are juggling work and parenthood, but yet you expect them to feel sorry for you. No one wants to hear about hard your life is because we all have problems. When you’re constantly playing the victim it’s probably because you make a lot of poor life choices and you’re refusing to accept responsibility for any of them.
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