I was thrilled when I got my first booking as a professional photographer. Until then, I’d treated photography as a side hustle, something I experimented with around other work. But when a well known company approached me to shoot their new collections I felt I’d really arrived. We planned a few sessions, but about 30 minutes into the first one I was taken to one side and asked to crop out the model’s face. Apparently she didn’t look quite the way the client had imagined when looking at her portfolio. The person who spoke to me actually described her as “really ugly”. I’m ashamed I didn’t walk out there and then.
I did later manage to free myself from that client, but the experience left me determined to never collaborate with anyone who thought that way. Though I was excited by the idea of working in fashion photography, it highlighted how narrow the concepts of beauty can be in the industry. This reiterated what I’d learned growing up in a small town in Austria where everyone I saw on TV was white and representations of disability were very stereotypical. There was a degree of diversity in my own family that I just didn’t see reflected.
