Interview with Asian Model G.

G. contacted me in response to my post for Asian models on Craigslist (see my January 19th posting for the text).  She works at an upscale Manhattan restaurant but lives with her husband in Jamaica, which she described as a "rough" neighborhood.  She is a petite woman who had modeled in Taiwan prior to coming to NYC and who will be returning home to celebrate the lunar New Year.We met in the Madison Square area and sat and talked for about a half hour at a coffee shop on 23rd Street.

When interviewing models prior to scheduling a shoot, I am first of all interested in determining what the model looks like in real life.  I know better than anyone how different a woman can look wearing professionally done makeup in photos.  Beyond that, I look for common ground, what might better be described as empathy.  It's important to me that a model understand what I'm trying to do in my work and be sympathetic to my goals.  If a model has an attitude or just wants to pop in front of the camera for a few minutes before collecting her pay, there's no way I'm going to work with her.

G. was both mature and very sweet person and someone I thought I could work with very easily.  A big plus is that she worked as a figure model in Taiwan and is not necessarily biased against nudity as long as she feels she can trust the photographer.  While I want the photos for my online project to contain images only of clothed models, I regularly work with the female nude and always like to make contact with models who are willing to do figure work. 

She was also a Buddhist and we discussed the different schools at length.  She herself belongs to the sect which believes in chanting "nam myoho renge kyo" as a means to enlightenment.  I told her honestly that my problem with that was that I could not understand how chanting for material goals could bring one to enlightenment when the whole concept of Buddhism, as I understood it, was to free an individual from attachment to material possessions.  G. suggested that it was a type of trick in that the real goal of chanting was to bring out the Buddha within one and that chanting for material goals was simply a technique to give beginners a reason to begin chanting in the first place.  The idea being that once a person has chanted for a while, he or she will be enlightened enough to realize they do not really need the things for which they had originally begun chanting.  It was an interesting concept and one I had not thought of myself.