Studio hire

Studio hire

In the locked-down world we live in at present, very few people are in the happy position of one man, who I’ll call H – he has a studio at home, and he’s married to a professional model. His life has been less affected by lockdown than some: indeed, his wife has posted a YouTube video about things they’ve discovered about each other in the last two months – usually, his wife is touring for two weeks out of every four.

Others in the model-photographing community have been trying out remote shoots (a whole subject on its own), and in the last couple of weeks have been starting to work out of doors.

Many of us, though, are looking forward to when we can start using studios again: possibly tempering any ‘official’ end to lockdown with our own take on the conditions at any given studio. My own tuition work will be waiting a bit longer, and possibly a lot longer: as it involves up to six photographers, and it’s difficult to coach form two metres!

All of this led me to look in an elderly file from the days when you wrote off to studios and received an information pack in return. Photographic magazines carried ads from studios in the classified section.
There was no internet: and a fairly limited number of professional models – the plus side of this, for many, was that Page 3 girls and other popular glamour models could often be found on the model registers of studios: the downside was that there were relatively few girls who specialised in art nude work.



Another big difference was that pictures were almost always, and quite definitely, not for publication. If you wanted to exhibit at a club, or send images off to a photographic magazine you had to get a model release form signed: typically, this would require an extra payment of one hour’s fee. So, if a model was charging £20 per hour, three hours would cost a total of £80…

I didn’t start using model release forms until 1992, so I very rarely post older images: today, you have to make do with a few of the old advertisements, and a slide box.



Fortunately, studios tended to be run by enthusiasts then (as now) and their charges were generally much lower than the model fees – today, they are much closer together, and sometimes reversed, for particularly large and well-equipped studios.

If it’s a world you’ve never visited, it may be worth having a look, when the world begins to get back to normal… Many studios these days are highly reputable and great places: as the old advertisements sometimes hint, there was a time when some were decidedly not.