This is one of those reasons they hate smart girls in the modelling industry — they make documentaries, knowing how duplicitous and mafia-like the industry she’s putting on the spot, I’m surprised the model turned filmmaker is still not blacklisted for being a whistleblower.“The people in the industry who are doing these things are much more powerful, and the model is totally disposable. She could be gone in two years.” – according to Sara Ziff and Ole Schell’s documentary “Picture Me”, which exposes the dirty underbelly of modeling.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jun/07/sara-ziff-teen-modelling-fashion
Sara Ziff was 14 when she first began modelling. Her third casting was in the East Village in New York. “We had to go in one by one. The photographer said he wanted to see me without my shirt on. Then he told me that it was still hard to imagine me for the story so could I take my trousers off. I was standing there in a pair of Mickey Mouse knickers and a sports bra. I didn’t even have breasts yet. ‘We might need to see you without your bra,’ he told me. It was like he was a shark circling me, walking around and around, looking me up and down without saying anything. I did what he told me to. I was just eager to be liked and get the job. I didn’t know any better.” Teenage girls, she says, are being persuaded to pose in a sexual way when they don’t even know what it means yet. She recalls being a “virginal teenager” and posing innocently when she didn’t feel remotely sexy. “The images came out and they were practically pornographic. What the photographer saw was not what I felt. It had nothing to do with that 14-year-old and what she was feeling and everything to do with what the person behind the camera projected onto her.” For all her success as a model – she was out-earning her father, a university neurobiologist, by the time she was 20 – Ziff was probably always an outsider in the industry. Put it this way, she’s the first model I’ve met who quotes Joan Didion. Her parents are academics who never approved of her career and it’s possible she thought too much about the wider significance of what she was doing to really enjoy it herself (she was taking courses in women’s studies while at the same time modelling couture). For once, being beautiful and brainy doesn’t seem such an enviable combination.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-04-08/the-ugly-truth-about-models/full/
“You can’t talk about issue of body image without addressing extreme youth of the models,” said Ziff. “Girls that are 14, 15 and 16 can be naturally thin in the way that a 30-year-old woman can’t be. Certainly there might be cases of [anorexia], but most of the time it’s not that they aren’t anorexic, it’s that they’re extremely young.” What people really should be asking, she continued, is “why do we have this Peter Pan syndrome where women never age? We don’t want to see images of women who are grown up. The models never age, and a 17-year-old will be replaced by a 15-year-old o n the runway. For me, it was illuminating to realize that.”
One of the most grounded icons in the “fashion house” died at the aged of 92 yesterday in his Manhattan home. These words were written in his obituary: “Irving Penn, A courtly man whose gentle demeanor masked an intense perfectionism, Mr. Penn adopted the pose of a humble craftsman while helping to shape a field known for putting on airs. Although schooled …in painting and design, he chose to define himself as a photographer, scraping his early canvases of paint so that they might serve a more useful life as backdrops to his pictures.”
ich he graduated 1938. Penn’s drawings were published by Harper’s Bazaar and he also painted. As his career in photography blossomed, he became known for post World War II feminine chic and glamour photography. Clarity, composition, careful arrangement of objects or people, form, and the use of light characterize Penn’s work. Penn also photographs still life objects and found objects in unusual arrangements with great detail and clarity.
His still life compositions are skillfully arranged assemblages of food or objects; at once spare and highly organized, the objects are raised to a graphic perfection, articulating the abstract interplay of line and volume.
Mr. Penn