The most requested location in my portfolio is an empty room in Hackney with a parquet floor, one radiator, and a window that faces the wrong way for photography until about 4pm, at which point it becomes the best-lit room in London for eleven minutes.
I've shot in palazzos and purpose-built studios with cycloramas the size of tennis courts. I keep coming back to empty rooms. Here's my theory about why.
A dressed set answers all the questions in advance. Here is the story, says the chaise longue; here is the era, says the wallpaper. The model becomes a prop among props - an expensive one, but still. An empty room answers nothing. Whatever the picture is going to mean has to come from the figure in it, which is terrifying in exactly the right way. The pressure lands where it should: on posture, on gesture, on the honesty of a face doing nothing.
Empty rooms also teach you about light like nothing else, because light is the only thing that changes in them. Spend a day in one and you'll watch a wall go from grey to gold to blue, and you'll start to understand what photographers mean when they say the sun moves fast. It does. Eleven minutes, remember.
My advice to new models is always the same: find your empty room. Skip the studio hire, ask a friend with a camera, and spend an afternoon with nothing to lean on. You will hate the first hour. Somewhere in the third, you'll meet the version of yourself the bookings eventually come for.