She Didn’t Think She Was Beautiful. The Camera Disagreed.

My Editor Wanted Urban. I Found Chi.

“Ron, we need you to think urban,” challenged my editor at FPG International, one of the leading stock photography agencies in the 1990s. “Your work is getting noticed, but now we need not only urban but a more international look.”

Charlotte was far from looking like an international city. Most of my shoots were mainstream for the time: blonde, blue-eyed families having fun on the beach. The images sold well. No complaints. My editor was encouraging me to get ahead of the curve. The Asian, European, and South American markets were catching on, and they needed faces that looked like their customers.

While I couldn't make Charlotte look like Barcelona or Paris, I could diversify my talent casting. Sara, my production coordinator, started looking through the model books. Fortunately, Anne Ray Swindell of The Talent Connection had just updated the model cards and recommended we consider a new model, Chi Phan, for our shoots.

Within weeks, she was on set. Not once, but several times over the coming months. I remember her walking in confident, wardrobe perfect, making friends with the crew within minutes. She had an artistic intensity about her.

Thirty years later, I came across folders of negatives from those shoots. While the scanner whirred, the light pulsing through the negatives, I did a quick Google search for Chi. She immediately showed up. She's a photographer now, with her contact information on her website.  

Nervously, I dropped her a short message.

“Chi, this is Ron Chapple. We shot together in the mid-1990s.” 

Seven seconds later, Chi replied: ‘I was just thinking about you!”

The cosmic consciousness was working. 

After chatting for a few minutes, I asked if I could post a few photos and if she would share what she remembered from the shoots. 

These are her unedited words:

“I remember how beautiful your photographs made me feel. I’ve looked at those images for more than 30 years, and they still have that effect on me today.

I was a young Asian girl modeling in North Carolina at a time when diversity wasn’t exactly a priority in advertising. There weren’t many faces that looked like mine in magazines or campaigns, and I hadn’t grown up believing I was particularly beautiful. My nose was flat, my eyes were 'slanty,' and growing up, I always wished I had the tall nose and big, beautiful eyes of Caucasian girls. I thought that was what pretty was supposed to look like. I grew up believing that the very features that made me Asian were the ones that made me less beautiful.

Finding an agency willing to represent me was exciting enough. Being hired by a photographer of Ron’s caliber on several occasions was something else entirely.

Ron saw something in me that I hadn’t quite learned to see in myself.

I remember feeling comfortable on his sets. He was engaging, encouraging, and made the experience feel effortless. I wasn’t simply there to be photographed. I felt seen, appreciated, and beautiful.

Interestingly, although I was modeling at the time, I hadn’t given much thought to the artistry happening on the other side of the camera. But working with Ron sparked a curiosity about photography itself. For perhaps the first time, I found myself as interested in what the photographer was creating as I was in what I was supposed to be doing in front of his lens.

I couldn’t have known then that decades later, I would become a photographer myself.

Looking back, I realize those sessions gave me something far more lasting than beautiful photographs. They gave a young girl confidence, a sense of possibility, and perhaps even planted a seed for a creative passion that would find its way back to her many years later.

Ron, you may have simply been doing what you do so beautifully, but you made a lasting impression on that 21-year-old girl. Thank you for seeing her through your lens before she had fully learned to see herself.”

In my PhotoCON talks, I say win-win is good, but win-win-win is better. Hearing Chi’s words after thirty-plus years, I realized there had been three wins: my stock clients got new images, my studio got the revenue, and Chi got something none of us saw coming.

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Visit Chi Phan's web site.