Recently on Facebook a photographer I worked with last year posted up an album of photos from the shoot we did. Ordinarily I have taken little notice of the impact this has on both the photographer and model but in this instance the response to this album was so massive that it pretty much took me by surprise.
That is where the appeal ends however, soon enough I started getting plagued with random friend requests and steadily became more ill-tempered as self-proclaimed critics made comments such as 'wish the dress wasn't blue' or 'wish the water was blue' - sorry, what? If everything was perfect then it would not be what it is, it would be fake if everything was matched and perfectly organized.
Even worse was 98% of comments praised the photographer - which is all good, every model is generally used to the photographer getting all the praise for the shot because we know in the end we know it is 50/50: the photographer's talent plus the model's - but when comments praised the photographer for the model as though I was a mannequin he positioned and from how I took it probably gave birth to...that was when my temper flared.
Models get direction from photographers, TRUE, but most of the time we have to do it ourselves. We have to constantly move, we have to constantly pose, we have to make sure our feet are pointed, that our faces are "set" and every part of us is pose-worthy. The photographer, no matter how good, can ever make a model look good unless they are good themselves.
The point is, I got so unnecessarily upset over this whole Facebook fiasco that I think maybe photographers, models, creatives in general should refrain from posting their work on Facebook where it literally is a site that invades privacy, makes a general mockery of real life and is hardly a good place for creative appreciation. This is going to become a firm rule of mine in the future when I do photographic shoots: they are not allowed to post photos on their personal Facebooks and tag me in them. If it is their business Facebook then fine, I have no choice in the matter as they use that to promote themselves but in all other cases I will draw the line.
