Natasha, NOT Uma Thurman

I think she's the tallest and most IG-famous model I've worked with yet...

It’s a cliché to say to someone that they ought to write a book, so I didn’t say it to Natasha after our shoot today. She should totally write a book, though. Born in Russia but raised in southern Italy, she speaks several languages and has something of a checkered past (and the ill-conceived tattoos to prove it). She fled the coop at 18 and never looked back, a decision that saw her briefly homeless before someone discovered her natural propensity for modeling. Tall, blonde, striking – it was an inevitability, wasn’t it?

She reminded me of someone famous, but it took me a minute to put my finger on it. “Uma Thurman!” I finally realized. She gets this all the time, she says, but to her chagrin, as she doesn’t find Uma particularly pretty. “Ok so you’re like a prettier version of her,” I offer, worried I’ve already managed a faux pas within the first fifteen minutes of meeting her, but it doesn’t sour the mood.

And what a mood it is. This is the second shoot I’ve had here in Milan in two days, and technically at the same studio, but this time at the main location, which has many more shooting spaces and is busy with the sights and sounds of other creatives doing their thing. The hallways are flanked by rolls of seamless paper in every color, rigging contraptions, softboxes, flash units, moveable white and black walls – all things I have no use for as a weirdo obstinately shooting with natural light.

But the studio has got plenty of that, too: three huge windows, northwest-facing, let in all the light I’d need for the day. Imposter syndrome has never struck me harder than in this moment, as I’m in a studio in Milan, surrounded by working industry professionals, staring at a very tall and very well-established (277k followers on IG 😳) model. I don’t feel like I belong here, not even slightly - I am an interloper, a dauber, a dilettante. Doesn’t matter – I grab the camera and go about my business anyway.

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 Natasha, available for high resolution download. You can get two posts just like this one per month by subscribing there, plus lots of other perks.