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In retrospect, I wish I had spent one more year at home. Luckily, I had already traveled to Europe twice before I finally moved out at 17. I didn’t even really know what that meant. They asked if I wanted to come to Europe for the summer to model. My mom had paid for modeling classes, and some scout came through and discovered me. VALLETTA: I got discovered in Tulsa at a local agency. INTERVIEW: How did you get from Tulsa to Europe? INTERVIEW: You grew up in Oklahoma, right?ĪMBER VALLETTA: I grew up in Tulsa, then moved to Europe to model when I was 17. Amber VallettaĪBOVE: AMBER VALLETTA IN NEW YORK, JULY 2013. Two guys cutting my hair at the same time. So you have to find a way to make it more interesting.They looked at me and said, ‘Let’s cut your hair off.’ We went back to my apartment in Paris and just cut it all off.

Your parameter is basically a girl in a dress, and you do it every day. But you create problems to overcome the boredom. Looking at some of the things I’ve done, I remember the technical difficulties, the problems. She was probably also anxiously hoping the boat wasn’t going to fill with water. With this picture, Amber Valletta, the model, had been sitting so still for so long, I think she got a kind of rigor mortis.

Over the years you develop a bunch of skills. To do that you have to read each situation. You don’t want the photograph to feel staged. What you’re looking for, working with anyone from Beyoncé to David Beckham to Björk, is a moment of spontaneity. The Museum of Modern Art and the V&A had already asked to have the photos in their permanent collections, so they were elevated above just magazine shots. Two months later, I discovered Photoshop, with which I could have done the whole thing in just two minutes.Ī photo from this shoot ended up on a Giles Deacon dress. To get the shot, we had to aim for this one moment when there was a perfect balance between the strength of that artificial light and the strength of the dying sun.

We had just one, attached to the side of the boat that was our only lighting. We found tiny lights used for car shots in movies to illuminate people’s faces. I was trying to achieve the opposite – I wanted everything to be underexposed and muted, sombre. (If I were to choose a soundtrack for this shot, it would probably be Soave sia il vento from Così fan tutte.)īack then, film stock was really oversaturated, because it was developed in the amateur market, so you gotthese bright, vivid colours. I was also thinking a lot about Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven. Both have religious scenes of people floating down the river in the mist. I’d seen two films growing up that influenced this shot: one was Andrei Rublev, by Tarkovsky, and Time of the Gypsies by Emir Kusturica. When the film was developed it was exactly what I had wanted to achieve. We closed the river again and worked on everything we’d done wrong to get it right the second time around. When he asked me if I’d got the shot I said, “No!” and stormed off in a huff. Mr Bertelli, the boss of Prada, was standing there on the riverbank shouting at everyone.