Do you know the “on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” meme? Created as a flippant commentary on the bourgeoning internet in 1993, it turned out to be profoundly prophetic in ways that the original New York Times cartoonist never envisioned. “What does this have to do with naked women?” I hear you asking. If someone were to update the meme for 2025, it might read, “on the internet, nobody knows you don’t speak English.”
This is generally a good thing; technology has allowed us to transcend language barriers and communicate nearly without limit. As a resident of Hong Kong who doesn’t read Chinese, I rely on Google translate just to get by in my day-to-day life. “What does this have to do with naked women?” you ask again, growing annoyed an impatient. Today’s lovely model, Ana from Brazil (new country and continent!), doesn’t really speak English, a fact that I only learned when we were face-to-face before our shoot.
As an anglophone photographer living in southeast Asia, I’m used to at least some level of language barrier in my interactions with models. I’ve been pretty fortunate so far, in that I’ve never really worked with a model whose English was severely lacking. (Update: Since I wrote this writeup several months ago, I have in fact done shoots with zero-English models. Those stories are still to come!) When all of the setup for a shoot takes place over email, WhatsApp, or Instagram messages, each party can just use translation apps to communicate freely and clearly. Again, this is a good thing, especially when hammering out the details and expectations of working together. We don’t want to be talking past each other and get a nasty surprise on the day of the shoot. In this case, though, my communication with Ana led me to believe that her English was perfectly serviceable to get us through the day’s work.
I suppose I don’t know for certain that it isn’t, to be fair. But when I met her outside the studio on this crisp autumn morning in Milan, she spoke almost exclusively in Italian, and expressed that this was her preference. (She’s been living in Italy for many years and is married to an Italian man, to clarify. Her first language is Portuguese.) She did ask if I spoke “a little Italian” in our correspondence, and I admitted that I do. Still, I wasn’t expecting to conduct the entire shoot in a second language.
You go to war with the model you have, not the model you want, as Sun Tzu said.
This post continues over at my Patreon page. You can read the rest of the writeup there, as well as see many more photos from my session with Ana, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.