In New Documentary Film, The Fashion Models Shoot Back
Sara Ziff — an outspoken Sasha Pivovarova double — started modeling at 14, and deferred college to model full-time. After 12 years in the industry, she’s co-directed a documentary about the working lives of models.
Ziff’s film, Picture Me, premiered at the Gen Art film festival in New York on Monday — and after watching this trailer, I am dying to see it. Ziff’s background — her parents are an NYU neurobiologist and a lawyer, and Ziff herself went to high school at Manhattan’s tony Dalton school — made her an unusual fit in a profession that, as she explains, makes you feel like “a living doll.” And, as she worked in the industry, she began to question its practices: from the probably harmful (in an interview with the Daily Beast, Ziff relates working with a model so young that she was playing with a coloring book) to the abstractly interesting (there’s no better demonstration of the power dynamic of the photographer/model relationship than the footage, in the trailer, of Ziff turning her video camera on a backstage lensman who is shooting her). This is a girl who’s clearly read her Sontag. (It must have been a struggle to find the time. A brief summary of her very successful career requires mention of everything from Chanel couture and Balenciaga shows, to Delias catalogs, and ads for DKNY and the Gap.)