Lessons from "America's Next Top Model"

Wednesday, September 20th, witnessed the season premier of the 7th iteration of "America's Next Top Model." Top-model pundits are already predicting who's going somewhere on the show and who ain't.

I wonder if Vegas gives odds for the models on this show?

Leslie Gray Streeter of the Palm Beach Post writes:

"Tyra Banks' divas-in-training marathon is back, and the ladies in question are prettier and in some cases infinitely more drama-full than last year. Because those girls were whack like crack.

There are too many of them to have opinions about them all, but so far these are the ones that jump out at me, although I'd love some of them to jump back:

- Melrose: Too tragic and annoying for her own good. Bad attitude. Will be on for a long time.

- Michelle and Amanda: Boring twins, although they have a vague Rory Gilmore thing about them

- Anchal: Too beautiful. I can't even look at her because I don't look like that and it makes me so mad at my parents. And I can't be mad at the Mommy.

- Monique: A nightmare. Beautiful. Will go far.

My early picks are....who cares at this point? Just keep up the drama and I'll be back."

Personally, I've never seen the show. Nope. Not a single episode in all its six seasons and I didn't ruin my record by watching tonight's season premiere telecast. (I've never seen an episode of The Gilmore Girls either so I had to look up Rory Gilmore to know who she was.)

I haven't purposely avoided this televised masterpiece of American pop culture. I guess it never made it onto my To Do list. I was going to watch tonight's show but I forgot to tune in. Of course, not having ever seen ANTM doesn't mean I can't write a little bit about it.

I chose Ms. Streeter's mini ANTM report because it echoes what other writers seem to focus on when they write about this show, more specifically, when writing about the show's model-contestants. (Yeah, that means I read some other stuff about The CW network's ANTM show.)

Notice that Ms. Streeter's positive predictions focus, for the most part, on attitude and not beauty? This is a great lesson for those of us who are pretty girl shooters. In a way, it also indirectly echoes the quote I recorded in yesterday's update-- the one by photographer Peter Adams who said, ""Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field."

Attitude is everything! Sure, I suppose there are models who are so devastatingly drop-dead gorgeous that almost nothing else matters. For the vast majority of models, however -- fashion models, glamour models, fine art nude models -- it's often about the attitudes and emotions they convey and just a bit less about their physical beauty. That's not to say sheer physical beauty doesn't rock. It does. But when you add intriguing and engaging attitudes and emotions -- attimotions if you don't mind me inventing a word -- they translate just as well in still images as they do on TV shows... sometimes even better, artistically at least.

So what's the lesson if you haven't already figured it out? Simply and briefly, beauty ain't always enough: Not for models and not for pretty girl shooters. If we want to capture memorable pictures of beautiful women we're going to have a better shot at successfully doing so when we coach, direct, cajole, beg, borrow, or steal those engaging attimotions from our subjects and clearly impress them on our images.

I'm trying hard to get quoted on PhotoQuotes.com, can ya tell?

If you're interested in viewing a streaming video trailer for the 7th season of "America's Next Top Model," you can click HERE.

The model at the top is Monica. She's expressing a lot of attimotinal stuff in that image. Okay, maybe it's not the exact 'tude I was looking for and maybe it was more about her feelings for me than anything else but it does show a range of attitude and emotion, right?