Some sitters arrive through the loud channels — an agent's email, a casting deadline. Lily McMenamy came through the quiet one: another model I'd photographed for her own move into acting passed my name along. I like that route best. It means the last set worked in rooms I never see.
You may know the surname twice over. Her mother, Kristen McMenamy, spent the nineties proving a model could be something stranger than decorative. Lily's own record is broad: on the runway since 2012, from Saint Laurent to Chanel, campaigns for Marc Jacobs and Versace, a screen debut in A Bigger Splash, a physical theatre diploma from the Lecoq school in Paris, a master's in performance making from Goldsmiths, and a solo stage show that travelled from Paris to Los Angeles. At thirty-two she has already been several kinds of performer. This session existed because she is adding one more.
Two decades of actor headshots teach you one thing about photographing models: their competence is the obstacle. A model's job is to resolve the frame — a finished surface, delivered at speed, repeatable on command. An actor's job is nearly the opposite. She has to be caught mid-process, slightly unresolved, the thought still moving behind the eyes. A casting director is not buying a picture; they are auditioning behaviour. The still has to feel overheard rather than presented.
So the first hour was de-modelling. I pulled the tempo down to conversation speed and banned the reset — that small shake-and-recompose a model performs between frames, returning to neutral like a typewriter carriage. I stopped offering adjectives and gave her verbs: decide, forgive, refuse. This is direction rather than photography, and it is the part of the job my cinematography training still pays for. On a film set the camera reads intention or it reads nothing; the same is true fifty frames into a headshot session. Runway and stage project to the far end of a room. The lens stands where a scene partner stands — close enough to be confided in.
There is a private joke inside this session. Lily's own research — genuinely, this is her academic subject — moves toward an embodied theory of modelling: what the job installs in a body, how the poses get in and how they stay. She has spent years turning the mask into theory. I spent an afternoon asking her to set both down. She managed it faster than almost anyone I have photographed, and I suspect the theory is exactly why. A performer who has studied the mask can remove it on purpose. The four women in the final edit are not looks; they are castable people, each with somewhere to be after the frame ends.
Where she points these next is her news to break, not mine. My part ends when the range is real and the pictures can carry it. If you are making a turn of your own — model to actor, stage to screen — that rebuild is what the Director's Session is built for.