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August 29, 2008
I'm a model, you know what I mean?
Anyone who has browsed the back pages of Tokyo's English language magazine Metropolis will be familiar with its mix of mundane classifieds and salacious personal ads. But if you are like me you might also have noticed that there has been a big increase in the number of 'Models Wanted' ads in recent months. It's seems more and more photographers are turning to the magazine's back pages to find suitable people to photograph.
Not surprisingly there are going to be models and photographers who feel uncomfortable advertising their services alongside 'Single Japanese female seeks tall handsome American businessman for relationship leading to marriage'. Thankfully, there's now an alternative to posting modeling ads alongside the anguished cries of the desperate and dateless.
TokyoModeling.com bills itself as "Japan’s premier bilingual community for the modeling industry." The idea is simple enough: photographers, models and others with an interest in the process upload their portfolio to the site. Once completed, registered members are able to browse user profiles and contact those people the are interested in.
The site is easy to use, helped by a clean design and 'image first' philosophy straight out of the Flickr playbook. There's also a search engine which allows agents and photographers to search for models based on hair color, eye color, etc. as well as exhibition listings.
Naturally, like any social networking site there's a danger here that personal information may fall into the hands of unscrupulous types. I for one, however, think the benefits of this kind of internet-based networking far outweigh the risks. Anyone who has a problem uploading headshots and contact details should think twice about signing up. In fact, models who have a problem sending out this kind of information are probably in the wrong business...
Posted by Marcus at August 29, 2008 2:55 PM
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