Posing as a political act

​One of the seemingly more precarious jobs I held back in Precambrian era was life modelling.  Economic forces worked in my favour as not many people were happy taking their clothes off for money thirty years ago even in a culturally acceptable environment.  But it gave me a chance to have control over my image and the way I presented myself.  Posing naked became a political act that also paid the bills.
 
Rebelling against the constraints I felt were imposed on me as a young actor (deliberating avoiding the gendered term, actress) led in this experimentation with exposing my skin on my own terms. 
 
I got naked initially in response to the request from a television producer to provide head and body shots before embarking on a television acting course with him.  I was a graduate of a television presenting course with the same man who was a well-known news presenter as well as a producer for TVNZ. Through that course I had the opportunity to read the news on our local channel and eventually after graduating from university had my own show on children’s television and appeared on various comedy and children’s programmes. The climate in television culture in New Zealand in the late seventies early eighties had begun to respond to demands made by feminists within and without the corporation. This producer had requested the full body shots be as scantily clothed as possible so we could really see what our bodies looked like and therefore what we could roles we could realistically play.  I am pretty sure he didn’t use the word ‘scantily’ but his message was that if we were brave enough we would have the shots taken naked, but that he didn’t expect that. I don’t recall if I discussed my misgivings about this with fellow classmates later, but my immediate response was to ask a friend who was a professional photographer to take shots of me naked but in poses that implied and contexts that implied a distortion of the male gaze towards the prurient.  
 

​I still love these photos because I assumed control of my image.  
 
This early experience of twisting a request to reveal myself as a performer led to me later using life modelling as not only a way to fund my artistic training but also to further my practice in and of itself.  I learnt about the theory of drawing, painting and sculpting the human form at some of the best art schools in London while being paid for it and put myself through durational performative stress before I even knew it was a thing.