Vietnamese Amateur Model Search For Vietnam’s Next Top Model

*** Please contact me if you or someone you know is interested in taking photos with me in Vietnam or is traveling to Vietnam!
Projects range from casual, natural portraits to dramatic, edgy, creative concepts. ***

Spite that Vietnam is the home of the most naturally beautiful women Vietnamese model search has been a challenge.

Approaching a beautiful girl at a noodle shop and asking her for a test shoot is culturally out of the question (would be the Vietnamese equivalent of being discovered at a McDonald’s).

Teenage girls are painfully shy with foreigners and either giggle and walk away or have that very funny deer caught in the headlight bewildered look as illustrated here:

This is an actual look I received and I could have 100’s of photos like this if I had the heart to raise the camera every time.

Searching for Vietnamese models online usually brings up ones living in the USA or Canada.
Browsing the most popular modeling portals like OneModelPlace or ModelMayhem comes up with few or zero results for Vietnam not to mention that most people here have never heard of Craigslist either and MySpace is not very easy to search.

Girls and females in general usually wear long pants, short shorts or mini skirts are very rare. One girl told me it would shame her parents if she was seen dressed more provocatively.
Quite a culture shock for me coming from Waikiki Beach, Hawaii where a woman wearing more than a bikini or a sarong on the street is considered dressed up!

But this is a good measure of how likely it is for a stranger with camera in hand to gain trust after just walking up to someone even in the name of “model search”. Bigger cities a might be slightly different but not really.

I was also surprised to hear that kids study primarily French in school so finding an English speaking girl during such a random search like picking out a potential model from the crowd is slim.

Paying a Vietnamese modeling agency could be an obvious option but modeling culture is still in its infancy in Vietnam and as I was told most models are independent anyways; also affording such an expense is not in accordance with my multi-month Southeast Asia traveling budget.

Therefore I have been and will be doing travel, cultural, people, portrait, kids photography which is fine and very rewarding in Vietnam.

This post with a catchy title is just an attempt to voice that I am looking for models or non-models, everyday girls for photography projects so the word is at least out there.
But it also does not mean that I cannot make someone Vietnam’s Next Top Model! Try me!

The stunning scenery of Vietnam is a perfect location for modeling photo shoots.

This little girl was actually a great model for a few seconds but this funny picture of her fits the subject of this post so well:

UPDATE:
As of may 9, 2008 I have received four inquiries about the above post:
1. an African-American girl from Texas, USA … very funny, not sure how she figured to be Vietnam’s Next Top Model?
2. a mixed ethnicity girl but I saw no asian in the mix living somewhere in the Midwest USA, with no plans to come to Vietnam
3. a Vietnamese girl from California, she will be visiting Vietnam in August … I saved her contact info
4. a beautiful and experienced model from Hanoi, my meeting with her was the reason for my return to Hanoi from Ninh Binh