Nothing is as it seems!

Tweet

So I always knew that the people you see modelling clothes in catalogues or posing in holiday brochures were not genuinely just meeting their friends for a chat or relaxing by the pool on their actual holiday, but were models hired for the photo shoot. I found out later that those people who stop you in the street to ask you to donate to a charity are not actually charity workers, and are just agency staff who could just as well be working on behalf of a different charity next week. And the rapping farmers in the Yeo Valley adverts were, sadly, not the real farmers. And of course meals rarely turn out looking like the photos in cook-books because that food is manipulated in so many ways that food photography is a specialism in its own right! But other, more straightforward things I naïvely imagined were simply as they appeared. Photographs of a company's employees for example, or people involved in charity fundraisers. Now a couple of revelations have made me doubt everything! First, one of the people who was in the cast of last year’s panto with us, is actually an aspiring actor who has had a few roles in minor films. Out of curiosity I looked at his web-site to see what else he had been doing, and found he had undertaken some modelling roles. In one he was posing as a surveyor walking around a building site with his hard hat and clip-board, and in another he was simply wearing an ID badge and standing in front of a building with a group of ‘employees’ of a biotech company. I found it hard to believe that it would be easier and cheaper to hire a model to pretend to be a surveyor than simply to film the actual surveyor doing his everyday work. And as for the employees – that just blew my mind. I mean you see a photo encouraging applicants to ‘join our team’ and if you did and were successful you might wonder why you never met any of the people you had seen in the promo shot, and then you would find that none of those people actually worked for the company! Whoever said ‘the camera never lies’ was the biggest liar of all! All rights reserved. © Text copyright Fleur 2023.