THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PICTURE – PART 5

When your name is neither Vogue, nor Vanity Fair, when you’re simply a lawyer in banking and financial law (it’s quite arid, I agree) but you want to become the poet, the representative of Parisian elegance, how do you organise a photo shoot ?

Well it’s much easier than you’d think, you don’t plan anything. Absolutely nothing. Just do everything last minute.

The crew : myself, the photographer and my closet, which has a life of its own.

Let’s do a recap :

My hair is always in a total mess, my eyes are puffy and underlined by dark purple circles (thanks to sleepless nights). As you can imagine, this doesn’t make things any easier for the photographer, so at an indecent time in the morning, I run after a relaxing, energizing, decongestant – god knows what else – treatment.

Thanks to coffee and to the anti-puffiness treatment, I come to life and I have now to run after the coulouring/makeup-ing activity and the dressing/clothing process. Be it the makeup or the clothes, nothing is prepared, of course, because I do all of that in a panic and depending on the mood of the day.

To accomplish this, all you need to do is dive (and I use that word because there is a true risk of drowing) in the closet, which is – I concede – nearly bottomless because I’ve been keeping nearly everything for nearly forever.

All of that takes at least two hours because between the kids, the emails, the professional callsand my daily press review, the process is regularly disrupted.

Because I do everything in a panic, depending on my mood that day, the makeup can go totally wrong and actually end up looking like colouring so that all too often we end up with pictures where I have, in the best case, a pallid complexion and in the worst case, eyes like a spaniel’s.

Because I do everything in a panic, depending on my mood that day, the outfit or the posture goes wrong and we end up with an awful result.

Because I do everything in a panic, depending on my mood that day and that I never check the weather forecast, the places where we shoot are found haphazardly so that all too often we end up shooting underneath pouring rain (so much fun) and I end up being drenched to the bones.

So that all too often, we shoot in places that do not match what I wanted.

Because I do everything in a panic, depending on my mood at that moment (the timespan diminishes), that the emails pile up and the clients call, the session can often be cut short, I just have to move on and deal with something else.

This happens so often that we end up with pictures of me making faces, sticking my tongue out, or taking pictures of the photographer (which doesn’t help him at all as you can imagine).

And in those moments, the photographer says « ok, we’ve lost her again ».

What did you expect.

May 3, 2018