Every model has a favourite prop, and mine costs about fifty cents at any kiosk in the city. A newspaper. An actual, physical, broadsheet newspaper - the bigger and greyer the better.
Here is the problem the newspaper solves. On a cafe terrace shoot, the hardest question is what your hands are doing. A coffee cup works for exactly one frame before it starts looking staged. A phone makes every photo look like an ad for the phone. But a newspaper? A newspaper gives you thirty options a minute. Held high, it's architecture. Folded, it's attitude. Mid-page-turn, it's the candid every art director secretly wants.
The trick, and I say this with love to every model reading this: you have to actually read it. The camera can tell. On my favourite terrace shoot, I got genuinely absorbed in a business page about pistachio exports - a subject I have never once thought about before or since - and those frames were the entire final edit. My eyebrows were doing something no amount of direction could have produced, because a man in the article had lost forty containers of pistachios and I needed to know how.
The photographer asked afterward what I'd been thinking about in the good frames. I told him: logistics. He put it in the caption. Somewhere out there is a campaign image of me in a trench coat, apparently lost in elegant reverie, actually worrying about a stranger's nuts stuck in a port. That's the job. The glamour is real, but it's built out of fifty-cent props and honest curiosity.