How it all started for me as a model part 1

Every time I am having a boring or awkward photoshoot, I am thinking "I should write a book about that". And every time I am done with the photoshoot, I merrily run to a nearby Vietnamese food to comfort myself, so I immediately forget all my witty advices that I was creating in my mind during the entire workday. But even with all that, I recently wrote some texts for that "book" project and soon they will appear on my Patreon. I hope it will be funny to read, and I hope my english mistakes will not be too annoying...

How it all started

As I was a kid of 90s, every magazine  for little girls was saying: "The job of a model is very tuff and unfair, girls, do not want to be models!" That was time of heroin chic, anorexia and big tabloid scandals. So of course I was never a fan of that. As a good girl, I took that advice from magazines very seriously and in my mind models always existed in a completely different world. I never dreamed about getting there 🙂

How ironic...

Anyway, few years later I started to get into modeling when I was at my uni. Why? Because girly magazines stopped telling me not to do so 😄 And I needed a hobby to brag around my friends 😄 Also I discovered, that it is not necessary to be " a chosen one" through an agency, cause there is a vast amount of people who do artistic photography as a hobby and passion. So less chances to get into cruel world of high fashion, parties and drugs, but pure joy of creation.

My very first shooting happened when I asked a girl from my studies to make some photos of me in lingerie, so I could make a pocket calendar as a gift for my boyfriend. I enjoyed that experience and even shared a few portraits on my social media.

Soon after that a beginner photographer invited me to make a TFP shooting. I had no idea it could work that way - that someone who has a camera would like to make photos of me without any payment AND he even invited a real make up artist. I was 19 or 20 and it was my first professional make up ever. Actually during next few years almost every shooting with make up and hair stylists involved ended up with me, wearing that look as long as possible, sometimes till the evening next day 🤫

So till year 2016 I was not considering myself a model, even though I was organizing photoshoots for myself almost every month. I was working as a tourguide, and that tourguide secretly had a nude-art modeling portfolio hidden in her smartphone. 

Soon that portfolio changed my life in every aspect, including changing of name, country, color of passport, language, level of income and friends. But this is a story for a 2nd post :)

And to finish this one, there are a few fallacies I used to have as a girl, who was taking part in TFP shoots for about 4 years, untill I was invited to do modeling professionally:

• Photographer is the smartest person in the world, he (she) definitely knows better
• If you want to be a good model, you have to do EVERYTHING people ask you to do. You never show you are tired, frozen, hungry, or that you don't like the idea that a photographer wants to shoot.
• If you are not an agency model it is impossible to get money for modeling. You only can do it for your own fun and obviously for free.
• TFP models are not "real models', your effort is not real and you have to be grateful people from the photo industry want to talk to you at all.

Now it all sounds funny and a bit exaggerated, but believe me, in my young and not confident brain it was even worse:) So I am really very lucky, as people didnt take advantage of me at that moment, but mainly cheered my motivation and level of engagement in photoshoots.

Photo - by Natalia Stankevich, year 2014 I suppose...