Being Seen and Being Looked At Are Not the Same Thing

Modeling wasn’t part of a plan.

There wasn’t a plan.

I was at a friend’s gallery opening, wearing something I probably had no business wearing in a room full of people who knew how to dress for that kind of night. I remember feeling slightly overdressed and slightly invisible at the same time, which is a weird combination until you realize those two things can coexist.

A photographer found me across the room.

That’s the only way I know how to describe it. Like I was something already framed before he even lifted a camera.

He didn’t really ask. He just insisted, in a polite way that still somehow meant there was no exit strategy. He gave me his card like it was inevitable.

I ignored it for months.

Then winter came. Bills came. Life did what it does when you’re not paying close attention, and suddenly I was holding that card again thinking, fine. I’ll try it once.

The first test shoot changed the math.

Not because it was glamorous or life-altering in a dramatic sense, but because for the first time I was in a space where my height wasn’t treated like the entire conversation. It was just one of the facts in the room.

That matters more than people think.

Now I work across editorial, runway, commercial, all of it. Some shoots are about scale—big, unapologetic, frame-filling concepts where the height is the point. I like those more than I expected to. There’s something honest about them.

But I think I like the quieter shoots even more. The close ones. The ones where you don’t immediately register anything unusual, just a face, a hand, a line of shoulder. The ones where I get to be a model before I’m a height statistic.

Both are true.

That’s the part people miss.

I don’t have one version of myself for spectacle and another for everything else. I’m just… all of it, depending on the frame.