Dispel the drama

Someone launched a tirade against me and two other photographers yesterday, because of images like this one above, where I'm modeling for the image with the girl. (There are some who believe a photographer should never touch a model, whereas I believe the photographer should simply ask the girl what her boundaries and preferences are, and then honor what she says.) The gal depicted above was totally okay with the concept, and fine with me posing with her to create it, and her response to it certainly doesn't indicate anything but positivity.

But there was another photographer present that day (one she'd shot with before), and I never knew prior to yesterday: that apparently he had premeditated to use the situation to cast me in a negative light. I don't know why. Funny that, as far as I know, he didn't mention that he, too, performed images where he was holding up the model's nude body. (We did an image where he held her up and then I edited him out, so that it would appear that gravity was going sideways.) Another unusual factor: he and the model speak Russian and kept talking to each other in their native tongue, so if they ever said anything to communicate any discomfort with the concepts and execution, then it wasn't said to me in English. Of all the strange situations that can happen in a shoot, I certainly never saw that one coming!

In a world where photographers—especially male ones shooting nude coeds—can easily be construed as predatory even when they're not, it's important to actually ask the model and photographer what boundaries were established, and ask if the communicated boundaries were respected. We will misread a situation (and become judgmental) if we assume that those involved had the same rules that we do.