What about Modeling Schools?
Things you should know!
1. You don’t need to go to modeling school to be a model. In fact most real model agencies would prefer you hadn’t. You will get the experience and training you need through test shoots, experience on the job, through conversations with your agent or personal manager, and, if necessary, from brief classes arranged, usually for free, by your agent.
2. A lot of what modeling schools teach is wrong! It’s a pretty good bet that the instructors are models from years gone by, from places you will never model in, and are types of models you will never be. That’s if you are lucky. A lot of instructors aren’t models at all, and never were. They are just graduates of the schools, imperfectly passing on what they learned. Or worse. They probably don’t really have the skills a professional model needs, and probably don’t know what skills you need.
3. Pictures from modeling schools aren’t what you really need. That’s not always true, of course. Once in a while a school gets lucky, or the manager is really good, and they get real, professional quality pictures done for their models. But the vast majority of the time they get junk. The school counts on the students and their parents not knowing any better, and they are usually correct. So all the money you spend on pictures is wasted. You could get selected by a real agency with simple snapshots just as easily.
4. They don’t tell you what you really need to know. At least, not if it keeps them from selling you classes, or pictures, or attendance at expensive conventions that they say you should attend. They are a business. They make their money by taking it from you, not making it for you. So you can count on them not to tell you what keeps them from making money. What are some of those things?
a. There isn’t much modeling work where you live.
b. You can’t be a model in a big city unless you live in the big city.
c. Unless you are a skinny, long-legged 5’10” 16 year old girl, you are going to have to pay all the expenses of relocating to where there really is modeling work. And with no guarantees of ever actually getting any.
d. Unless you are that same 5’10” girl, no model agency in any major market city is going to make you an offer to front expenses to work with them. Even then they still might not.
e. People who hire models, and model agencies, don’t care that you’ve been to modeling school.
f. You don’t need to know how to walk on a runway. OK, maybe if you are that tall skinny 16-year old you do, but the agency will teach you that in an hour. Nobody else needs to learn the runway walk. That’s not the kind of modeling they will do.
g. A photographer can’t take good portfolio pictures of ten people in a day.