Being a wishful, sinful, wicked teenager

Publié le 17 août 2015 par Rory

I had some new work come out this week. It was an editorial for Lutefisk magazine. I was happy with the images, because they arent really images of me.

Anyone who knows me will know that I dont sit around with my fingers laced over my eyes giving people the evils through wooden stair bannisters; I don’t lounge around with topless guys in window seats; or lurk provocatively in doorways silently eyeing up said guys as they hold half-eaten apples; I don’t wear tight body suits that reveal my thighs and butt as I lie on uncomfortable wooden stairs. I definitely don t live a “wishful, sinful, wicked teenage dream” as the editorial title suggests. Not even seven years ago when I was a teenager did I do that.

But that’s what I love about the images. Im playing a role in them, and I think I’m doing alright at it. This role-playing, however, is also the reason I determined that these images would probably just sneak into my portfolio book without being flaunted too much on my social media pages. In my experience, people outside the fashion industry often assume that images of models are meant to be, and are, about the models. The ‘role playing’ part of it gets lost.

Before I started modelling I knew a model-turned-stylist called Lucy. One day, when she was encouraging me to sign with an agency I said to her, “I’m just not sure if I want my image going out into the world, and having no control over how I’m presented.”

I said it falteringly though, with about five likes thrown in because I was, like, 18. Lucy’s reply was simple, “It’s not you though, it’s just your image.”

I understand that a person’s identity and their image are not completely divorced from each other, and that the dynamic between the two can be a complex mingling of separation, interrelation, and performance, whether youre a model or not. But something of Lucys words ring true in my experience.

If I’m being someone else in a photo-shoot, it’s easy to strike that immodest pose, to drop my bottom lip as though half my brain werent there, or to shift my gaze upwards as though I were contemplating soft and lovely thoughts. It’s easy to be a wishful, sinful, wicked teenager even though I actually consider myself a modest person, when I daydream I frown unattractively, and I wouldn’t return to my teenage years for anything. It’s easy because it’s removed from who I am. At the same time though, I cant do it convincingly unless part of it somehow really is me.

I grabbed this Johnny Depp quote from a completely unreliable online source, but I think it’s on point– “With any part you play, there is a certain amount of yourself in it. There has to be, otherwise it’s just not acting. It’s lying.”

Somewhere between my identity and images of me, truth does exist. Not as a formula in which an image is equivalent to who I am, but as a mechanism for story telling, and for trying to understand and interact with the world.

It’s an act of literally and metaphorically walking, or lounging about, in someone else’s shoes– something Ill write more on another time.