White knights

A ‘White Knight’ is modeling & photography slang for a photographer who is a bit too protective and weird about his model ‘friends’.  He’s generally harmless, a bit sad and likes to hang around with girls and play with their hair and stuff. This isn’t the same as being mates with a photographer.

The true White Knight secretly hopes that his favorite ‘friend’ will one day be distraught and confused about her boyfriend, her sexuality, or drunk enough, or hopefully all three, to let him shag her.  They tend to live in eternal hope though, unless they win the lottery.

On the more sinister side, some ‘photographers’ get very possessive about the models they shoot with, and consider them ‘their’ models exclusively.  They advise ‘their’ model to do lots and lots of shoots with them (usually on a TFCD basis) and to charge a lot of money for shoots with other photographers.

Naturally no other photographer wants to work with them, with some creepy, over-protective monkey hanging around, and being asked for ridiculous rates.  So the White Knight gets to hang around with the model a lot, and be her bestest friend and stuff.

There is a certain type of photographer that ‘discovers’ new models, and then attempts to simultaneously ‘launch their career’ and keep them all to themselves at the same time.  They tend to approach a pretty girl, convince them that they should model, build up their confidence on a series of shoots, and then get really pissed off and weird when ‘their’ model gets bored or wierded out, and goes off to shoot with somebody else.

There is a photographer in my local area that is well known for this type of behavior.  Apparently (I’ve never shot with him as I found him weird on the ‘phone) his ‘studio’ is a shed at the bottom of his garden, and he tells his wife that the models he shoots are paying him – but he’s actually paying them!

When they get fed up of him and start to work with other photographers, he tells the most awful lies about them to other models.  The most amusing thing he told me (within five minutes of my speaking to him on the ‘phone) was that my mate, who is a professional photographer, and one of the soundest, nicest people I’ve ever met, who was shooting a lot with ‘his’ discovery, had hopped over his garden wall with the model in tow, and tried to burn his studio down.  This mate of mine had a debilitating accident years ago, and was left with limited mobility.  He won’t be climbing over any walls any time soon.  He absolutely pissed himself when I told him about it, and the model told me all sorts of stories about this guy’s wacky behavior.

This particular White Knight told me all sorts of lies about other photographers, mainly along lurid, sex-offender lines, and started to get manipulative and pushy with me, telling me that we had agreed to shoot together when we hadn’t, and suggesting he might ruin my career by telling everybody that I was unreliable.  I eventually growled at him and he squeaked and disappeared.  I haven’t heard from him since.

Photographers and models often become mates, and mates look out for each other.  I’ve got some great mates who are photographers, and I don’t have to remove their tongue from my bum-crack after every shoot.

A good rule of thumb is that a mate will say “Don’t take any shit off that guy, he’s a wanker,” while a White Knight will come across all “I’ll protect you my pretty.  The world doesn’t understand you like I do.  I thought there was something weird about him; I didn’t like the way he looked at you.  I’ve bought a family sized box of Jaffa cakes and a bottle of Champagne.  Why don’t you stay at mine for a few days to sort your head out?”

Scare stories & real dangers

White Knights like to do a bit of scaremongering about model safety.  They’re the first to jump on the more sensational stories, whether in the press or just gossip, about a model being dramatically assaulted.  If you look a little deeper into the more sensational stories, you’ll often find that it’s nothing to do with modeling and photography at all.  The ‘glamour model’ was a pretty girl beaten up by her boyfriend and the issue was nothing to do with modeling, but rather the poor girl having a horrible bastard for a boyfriend.  But the White Knight types will use this kind of lurid tale regardless of the facts to scare newbies.

The cold fact of the matter is that many experienced models can tell you about the time that a ‘photographer’ (not the person they were having a relationship with but a relative stranger) made them really uncomfortable by acting weird, or being totally inappropriate, including deliberately trying to touch them up or talk to them in a sexual or abusive way.  It doesn’t happen all of the time, but certainly more than it should (which is never).  But this is the level of abuse that we’re talking about between strangers or people that have just recently met each other, when we’re being realistic and honest rather than scaremongering.

This is not to belittle anyone’s experience, but just to make it clear that ‘photographers’ that try to frighten you with lurid examples of murders and rapes, or make out that all other photographers are a danger to you as a reason why they should have your personal number and be your special friend are well, bloody weirdoes.  Alarm bells should definitely ring.

Read Part 2 here