China’s Next Top Model
Just after we arrived in China, in early May at a kid’s party thrown by a local expat organisation, I was approached by the party photographer who asked if I’d be interested in bringing M in for a test shoot. He does some work for local advertisers and Little Miss Blondie Blue-Eyes is always a big hit with the folks here. Some of you may have seen the stuff I written on Facebook about this subject a while ago, but for anyone who hasn’t heard me say it yet, walking around with M in Shanghai is, on some days, like being on tour with the world’s most famous pop star or something. Gangs of teenagers shriek and pull out mobile phones to pose with her and take photos. Old people stop in the street and point, and call other old people over to come stand in the street and point. People push their children towards her to stand with her for pictures. If we stop walking, crowds gather around her. It can be pretty freaky sometimes. The bottom line is, they love to look at her.
Anyway, at the time of the party we’d just moved here and I didn’t even have a phone yet so the photographer gave me his card. I got in touch with him over the summer but we couldn’t find a mutually agreeable time until now to get together. So yesterday was just, like, a ‘trial’ photo shoot, just to see how she handled it and all that kind of stuff, so there are no backgrounds, her hair’s a mess and she mainly just wore her own clothes – which included her “Belle” costume, as the way I convinced her to have a go was that we were going to “go take pretty princess pictures” to send to her friends and family. (The white dress in some of the pics was the studio’s.) Low pressure, we just tried to let her have a bit of fun. After we were done they downloaded all the photos onto a disc for me, there are 208 altogether but I’ve just pulled out a few to send to you as I can’t imagine anyone else besides me and Gus wanting to look at 208 photos of our daughter, as fabulous as she is.
What happens now is the phtotographer picks a handful he thinks are ‘best’ and puts them in his book of kids he is able to contact, then when a job comes in the clients will say something like, “oh we want a western looking girl, about 1 metre, maybe blond” etc etc and then he can show them the book. So, who knows, it may never lead to anything, or I might get a phone call now and again, whatever. If it comes to nothing, it was a fun day and we’ve got some nice photos of Her Highness for posterity!