***
So I’m in my car, headed towards 368 W Broadway, South Boston, MA, 02127 – Ms. Carol Evans’ photography studio.
It’s pouring outside, and if I zone out, take my eyes off the road, and focus on the windshield, I can see the individual rain drops go splat against the windshield, expanding outwards in diameter until my windshield wipers wipe them away into oblivion.
It’s what most people would call a dreary day, and even though I very much like rain, I feel a bit post-holiday bluesy, no denying it.
It occurs to me that this is not a good mood to be in for a photo shoot. I know I absolutely need to be on my game – need to feel the confidence flowing through my veins. Because what I feel deep inside is going to show through and be captured on camera – there's no hope of hiding it.
So I try to play mind tricks on myself. I switch the radio to R&B/hip-hop stations, turn up the jams, and pretend I’m smooth like Ne-Yo. David Guetta’s “Sexy Chick” comes on, and I tell myself damn, you’re a sexy guy…a sexy guy…
It’s not working, because I’m fully aware that I don’t ever think of myself as sexy, and it would be absurd to start now.
But then I take exit 25 for South Boston and emerge from the tunnel, and I feel the pressure again, that anxiety. And it hits me yet again that I’m actually going to be a model, at least for a day.
I pull onto the letter streets (D street) and get closer and closer. Finally, the Garmin announces, “Arriving at 368 W Broadway, on left,” and almost as if willed by fate, a car on my left pulls out from its parking spot on the street as I pass it. I’m absolutely thrilled, because finding parking can be a major stressor if the process gets prolonged – and I really don’t want to pay for a parking garage.
I’m half an hour early, and when I call Carol she tells me she’s not there yet, but there’s a coffee place a few doors down. Not wanting to stand in the rain and cold, I walk towards it, duffel bag of clothes in tow – pretty much all the clothes I own, plus a few hundred dollars worth of things I picked up from the mall (tags still attached, since I plan on returning them right after the shoot). I quickly pass about half an hour in Café Arpeggio, checking and sending a few emails.
When I walk back to the studio, I find the door propped open. I step in. A guy in a windbreaker and hat trails me in and asks, “Hey, are you looking for Carol?” I answer yes, and he tells me she’s on the fourth floor. Again, he follows me into the elevator. “I’ll come up with you.”
We chat a bit, and I find out Carol has been working in the area for quite some time, maybe 15 years if I remember correctly. After what seems like an awkward pause between the third and fourth floors, the door finally dings open, and I step out. He directs me to the second door on the right, and I knock, three strong and one last gentler one, because that’s how I always do it.
“Who is it?” a voice calls. “David.” The door opens.
Carol is tall and thin, and she’s wearing all black from head to shiny black boots, except for her red lipstick. She looks like she may have been a model herself in the past, and in general she looks very artsy. She doesn’t smile much, or give off any hints of strong emotion, really. All business.
Judging by the exterior of the building, you never would have been able to guess it would be this spacious. While I can’t see the inside of the studio – the entrance is sectioned off by some makeshift walls, I guess to provide sanctuary and privacy for the artists/models at work – I can see how high the ceilings are.
She tells me to step into the changing area, also sectioned off from the studio, and remove my clothes from my bags. While I do this, I hear the snapping of a camera. From what I learn later, she must have been messing with and adjusting the lighting. She pretty much ignores me until I walk out myself and tell her I’m ready.
Carol puts aside her camera and leads me back into the changing room to examine the clothes I’ve brought. I get a little nervous because I’m not exactly a fashion guru, and I generally value comfort over style, although I like to think I have at least some sense of style when I want to.
Finally she settles on an outfit (we’re set to do 2 outfits today) – a blue Calvin Klein sweater that I have, with my brown leather jacket that I wear all the time on top of that. She says the pants I have on – brown Dockers khakis – are fine. So she steps out to let me change.
Snap, snap, snap, I hear again.
I start to undress and take off the plaid shirt I have on, then realize I have another sweater just like the blue Calvin Klein one that’s green that I forgot to take out of my bag, and I step out to go ask her if she has a preference, blue or green.
She says she doesn’t care, either is fine, then adds, “I like what you have on now, though, we’ll do one with just that.”
Huh? I look down. Having taken off my plaid shirt, I’ve got on nothing but what’s basically a Nike wife beater – something that my friends constantly give me shit for wearing. I can’t help it – I just love the freedom of sleeveless when I’m hanging around inside.
“Really?” I ask, incredulous.
“Yeah,” she confirms. “You’ve got great arms.”
Being that she’s the one who knows what’s up, I push my doubts aside and emerge from the changing room, wearing brown khakis and black wifebeater, plus my Sambas. I get my first full view of the studio, and it’s incredibly spacious, with large white walls, as if somebody wanted the real physical embodiment of a blank canvas – a tabula rasa.
I start tucking in the wifebeater so it looks a bit neater – another thing that my friends give me shit for. Apparently, it’s not okay to tuck stuff in when you’re young in America.
She tells me she’ll help me out with that, then stops mid-thought and asks me, “Wait, are you sick?”
“Yeah, a little. Why?” Then I realize she was going to help me tuck in my shirt with her own hands, and I quickly reassure her I can take care of it. I’ve never really been comfortable with people touching me, even though I know she’s an absolute professional.
“I can’t afford to get sick, anyway. Not in this business,” she tells me.
She orders me to stand in front of a tall white screen that extends nearly to the ceiling, and with her hand guides me under some sort of pole that’s part of the lighting setup. I position myself accordingly, and I feel quite naked in my wife-beater, even though I wear this exact outfit quite often.
It’s because of the camera, and the situation, of course. It’s all about context.
Before I’m ready, and without any signal, she starts taking pictures of me. She quickly reassures me it’s alright, she’s just checking to make sure the lighting works well with me.
Then we start for real.
And I quickly realize that I’m completely comfortable in front of the camera.
Without ever having done anything like this before.
Once she starts shooting, the feeling of nakedness completely falls away, and now with a task at hand, I become hyper-focused. I think it also helps that my glasses are off. When you’re used to having the weight of frames and lenses on your face, and you suddenly take them off for an extended period of time, you experience a feeling of liberation. And although you can’t really see the world clearly (I have horrible vision – partly due to genetics, partly due to me reading at night, under my pillow with a flashlight, for years when I was young), you also don’t see the world through a grimy lens. You basically remove one more filter between yourself and the world, and it feels fantastic.
For those of you who have never done a photo shoot before, I'll tell you a little about the logistics of mine:
Carol first helps me find the pose she wants. She strikes a pose herself, then tells me to imitate her. Mimic my body, but not my facial expression. Then she'll give me more detailed instuctions. Chin down. Look this way a little. Open up your body. Lean this way. Put weight on your right leg, and turn the foot out. Hand on hips, elbow out. Bring your right arm up, grab the back of your neck, and hang your elbow down. Give me a smile. Do this one more on the serious side. Open your legs a little and put your left foot out a bit, I don’t want it to look too flat. Look right into the camera. And so on.
As soon as I assume the pose so that it looks natural – and this is important, because if it doesn't look natural she refuses to shoot it at all – she starts shooting right away, 3 to 4 photos in quick succession, so that I barely have time to prepare or readjust. I quickly guess that she does this to make sure everything looks spontaneous. After these 3 or 4 clicks of the camera, she glances at the camera to check if the shots came out well.
If the shots came out well, she moves on to the next pose. If not, she’ll try a few more, and maybe tell me to give her a little more smile (I think during the shoot my default was to be serious, though people sometimes tell me in real life that I’m always smiling). Every once in a while, she readjusts the lighting by moving around the poles and stands with big circular things attached to them.
On a few occasions, I try to put some extra feeling into the shot, and I think about some of my darker moments. At least on one of these occasions, there is a direct correlation between my trying to do this and her stepping closer in and focusing hard on my face. Always when she steps closer and aims right at my face, she'll tell me, now look right into the camera.
When we finish with the first outfit, she tells me to go and put on the blue sweater and my leather jacket. While I go do so, she asks, “So are you a student somewhere nearby?”
While I put on the sweater and my jacket, I explain to her that I am a college dropout. When I step out, I see on her face the slightest trace of a grin – the first sign of amusement, or any real emotion, really, during the entire shoot. It's the first time she loosens up and drops the professionalism a little (and just a little). “So you’re a college dropout?” she echoes.
I tell her a bit about my situation, about the book I’m writing, and about my interest in solving the problem of helping people defeat depression. And from then on, we talk almost nonstop throughout the rest of the shoot.
At a certain point during the discussion, I realize I'm still wearing the brown khakis, and that maybe it would be nice to switch it up with some jeans. When I ask her, she says, “Oh yeah,” as if it were obvious and she couldn’t believe she’d forget.
I bring my jeans out, then immediately continue the conversation, because that’s how I am when I become engaged in conversation – I’m pretty excitable and like to get into things. That’s when I realize I still haven't changed my pants.
“Do you mind…” I start, but she cuts me off. “I’m so used to seeing naked people, it’s not a problem at all, just change right there.” So I quickly undo the clasp of my belt, slip off my khakis, slip on my jeans, redo my belt, and all the meanwhile continue the conversation. We speak of our views on depression, on depression in different cultures, on coping mechanisms that people use to handle depression, and on life in general too. Carol leans herself elegantly on the top edge of the back of a small leather chair while we speak, and I stand.
Pretty soon we realize we have to start the second shoot, so she directs me, in my jeans and leather jacket, to a different white screen with a different colored rug. We go through the same process, except with a few new poses, now that I have the option of zipped, un-zipped, half-zipped, holding the zipper, unzipped and holding one flap of the jacket to the side with my hand on my hip, etc.
Throughout this second shoot, we continue to talk about depression, about other random things, about society, and about life. We agree that certain aspects of modern society are pretty fucked up, to use mutual words.
The second shoot seems to fly by, and being more comfortable and accustomed to the process, I hardly notice it. Sometimes I even laugh or smile while talking, and it ruins a picture or two for the shoot. No big deal. We shoot a few more.
Finally, we finish the shoot. I can't believe how easy it'd felt. With each pose, I knew instinctively whether or not it worked – it would either just feel right, or not. And I could tell when to go for serious, when to go for raw and intense, when to go for a lighter mood, and so on. I really felt I’d done a good job for a complete novice.
Of course, it could have all been in my head. That’s the thing about perception: it’s one sided, and not always well attuned with reality.
But then she says, “Well, I know we were only doing 2 outfits, but if you want to go put something else on, we can shoot another.”
“Of course, I’d love to!”
So I switch out my Sambas for my running shoes and put on a different yellow t-shirt and layer on top of that a black corduroy jacket (from the mall) that she says “looks a little creepy” but will help give me somewhat of a more corporate look for clients to see. We do the third shoot in front of a different white screen, and this time there is a leather sofa that I pose on and around. It is a little strange having to stop every once in a while to conceal the tags (sometimes they swing down into view), but overall it's much the same as the first two shoots. Later she says she’ll Photoshop out the “Express” label on the left sleeve of the jacket for me, since I'm returning it and can't cut it off.
Finally, it really is time to go, and she's all business again. I thank her profusely, gather my belongings, and let her walk me to the door.
“Well, I really liked everything you did today.” She gives me her card and adds, “If they don’t get back to you within a week and a half, let me know.” When I wish her, “Have a good day, and best of luck for the future,” she gives me that slight trace of a grin again, as if niceties and well-wishing are for the young and idealistic. But with that, I walk down the stairs (having already taken the elevator, I want to see what the interior of the building is like a little more) and out of the building.
***
What did I learn from this whole experience?
You never can say for sure what's going to happen. So make a few moves and keep at it. You just might surprise yourself.
Do I know if any clients are actually going to want me to model for them? Of course not. What I do know is that I did my part to pursue this lead, and I learned a lot - and a lot about myself - from the process.
I'm going to reiterate:
In the face of uncertainty, be persistent and believe in yourself.
-David
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