By: Fair Consulting Media

She built a career capturing other people’s best moments. Now, Deb Davis is stepping into her own spotlight, but not leaving her camera behind. She’s doing something far more interesting. She asks the women in front of her lens to stop hiding and helps them do the deep work required to mean it.

The Detroit-based photographer has spent years photographing polished, high-achieving women through her lens. But it wasn’t the glamour shots that stayed with her. It was what she saw underneath them. Time and again, Davis noticed the same quiet truth. These women were put-together on the outside, worn down and disconnected on the inside. That pattern, paired with her own journey as a breast cancer survivor, didn’t push her away from photography. Instead, it made her want to do something more.

Today she’s an author, speaker, life and empowerment coach, photographer, and the founder of The Transparency Table, and she’s quickly becoming one of the more talked-about voices in the personal transformation space. Her photography business, Detroit City Headshots, is still very much running. The Transparency Table is a separate company she built alongside it. Davis is clear that one didn’t grow out of the other. They’re two different businesses that happen to circle the same questions about confidence, identity, and what it takes for a woman to feel comfortable being seen.

Davis recently commanded the spotlight at the Leadership Experience Tour, wowing the crowd with the message she’s built her platform around. A woman can be achieving, performing, and holding everything together for everyone else, and still feel like a stranger to herself. But here’s what makes her different: she’s not just telling that story. She’s helping women change it.

“Transparency doesn’t mean telling everybody everything,” Davis says. “It begins with being willing to tell yourself the truth.”

It’s that idea, equal parts gentle and unflinching, that fills the pages of her book, The Faces of Transparency: What We Reveal, and drives the coaching work she’s best known for: The Transparency Journey™, a six-week experience that’s already carried previous groups of women through it, with the next cohort starting in November 2026.

Unlike a typical self-help program, The Transparency Journey™ isn’t built around checklists or five-step hacks. Davis designed it around six stages (Reveal, Release, Restore, Rise, Integrate, and Activate) meant to walk women through the messier, internal work of rediscovering who they are underneath the roles they play, and then actually living from it. It’s less “fix yourself” and more “come home to yourself.”

Her camera work stays its own thing. Detroit City Headshots runs separately, with its own Confidence and Camera Ready workshop for women getting ready to be photographed. No coaching enrollment is required, and no photo session is tacked onto the end of the program. Some women do both because they want to. Davis doesn’t package them together.

The women drawn to Davis’s work aren’t struggling in any way outsiders would notice. They’re the ones everyone assumes have it together: the dependable friend, the high-performing executive, the mom who never seems to drop a ball. Davis knows the type well. She’s lived it. And that lived-in credibility, built over years of watching accomplished women up close, is what’s turning The Transparency Table from a personal mission into a growing movement, with additional cohorts and community gatherings already being planned beyond the November group.

For all the buzz building around her, Davis insists her message isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about stopping the performance long enough to hear yourself again.

“A woman can be functioning, achieving, caring for everyone around her and still be disconnected from herself,” she says.

It’s a line that’s landed with audiences before, and one Davis expects will keep resonating as the next group of women takes their seat at The Transparency Journey™ this November.

Follow Deb Davis and The Transparency Table at thetransparencytable.com, the Transparency Table Facebook Group, and LinkedIn.