7. Other Considerations

I recommend getting a PO Box. You need to include an address on any contract, and if you’re not receiving pay or photos on site, then they have to mail them to you (meeting in person to get the photos is rare). For conditions of privacy, anonymity, safety, etc., a PO Box is a beautiful thing. Never use a work address. I discourage a home address due to safety reasons. A PO Box is also great if you move a lot or are planning to move at some point in the future.

Most contracts want a phone number. I generally leave it blank. No one’s ever had a problem with that.

Don’t give anyone your social security number. Photographers do not need to ask that. This income doesn’t get claimed on taxes (particularly nudity or porn!) unless you are with an agency or are pursuing it as a full time profession, so don’t worry about it. If a photographer wants your soc, tell them to suck your dick.

There are lots of different model portfolio sites for lots of different things: art, nudity, commercial modeling, etc. Most of them are free. I’m sending a list of those as well. It’s best to pimp yourself out to as many places as you can handle. Just make sure that you are able to run background on photographers from every place you look at, and make sure none of the sites publicly list your e-mail address. They should all launch a form in order for people to contact you, and the form should not show where your e-mail is being delivered to.

The search engines on OMP and other sites yield great finds, though for some reason not all photographers come up on the searches. Looking at both model and photographer profiles and then following links to other members is the best way I have found to discover the people I want to work with. Livejournal also has some okay communities for photography and modeling.

If you plan on featuring your modeling information on a web site, keep an eye on what information you post on it. For a while I had things other than modeling specifics on the same site as the modeling, and I started getting a lot of creepy e-mails from people who read the writing on my site. After those little peeks into my soul, many of them felt it was okay to ask me on dates or out for drinks, proposition me, tell me that they shared my views on sexuality and that we would therefore have wonderful chemistry, tell me that my lover didn’t appreciate me so they were going to kill him and then fuck my brains out (you may recall this guy, dumud on Livejournal), or generally worship the ground I stumble over. Eventually I just ended up having to abandon my name in its entirety, pick a new one, and set up shop under that without having any ties between my “normal” life and my “modeling” life, except in private conversations with people that I know. Your mileage may vary, of course, but goddamn, if you can avoid it from the start, I encourage you to do so.

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"The Drag of Gimp"

Since 1996, my life has been a long journey of visiting one doctor after another. I look more or less fine, but I'm not. My daily pill count is like playing the dozens with a hospice patient. One doctor will say I'm doomed, and send me to another for treatment, but the treating doctor will find nothing within his or her area of practice that can be treated.

My life is better than a comedy, better than a drama. Anyone who has done this knows what I mean when I say that you have to not only know the rules, but also play the part in order to be allowed in the game. Most people find what we go through in the medical merry-go-round to be unbelievable, which is why I call it "The Drag of Gimp."


About the author

Cassandra Disque

Extemporaneous flibbertigibbet with bone lumps growing out of my coccyx. I was born in 1981. I was another case of "too much, too young," or at least I wanted to be. Now I'm leaning toward "too little, too late," as my body conks out on me, and I find I haven't done hardly any of the things I wanted. This is supposed to happen to people twice my age, so you might find my perspective on life to be a little unusual -- as in, I find just about everything to be hysterically funny, because there's little use in worrying when it's all going to go kaput.