Film Screening – Role Models

Join us at ICP for a special screening of Role Models, directed by ICP Alumni Salome Ogenfuss, which focuses on a group of photographers documenting the goings on outside NYC fashion shows. The screening will be followed by Q+A with Ogenfuss.

About the Film

Role Models is a film about everyday photo habitués who traverse the streets of New York and Paris in pursuit of models to snap pictures of outside fashion shows. They are frequenters of an outside, birdwatchers of female beauty, gleaners - picking up images at the margins, at the gates of patronised culture.

Driven by adoration and loneliness, the men in the film aren't in it for the money, but are spurred on by the prospect of capturing transient interactions with the models to collect, in a hunt for images to take back home to their off-season hibernacula. In this image-coded world, they exist in ways that are equally social, para-social, and anti-social.

The film is about Longing in a culture of distantiating transparency and the mediated image, about the desire that got misplaced along the road somewhere. It’s a phenomenology of the outside: about those who don’t get to (and perhaps don’t even want to) exist on the inside—who don’t wear the badge of officialdom or the wristband of admittance.

Operationally, it is a verité documentary that is turning itself upside down; a patchwork of characters; about men who look at women, men looking at women. It would not pass a reverse Bechtel Test. Retired after 30 years, one of the characters assesses his current passion like this: ‘They ask John Dillinger why do you rob banks? And he told them, ‘because that’s where the money is. And why do you photograph female models? Well, that’s where the beauty is.' 

About the Speakers: 

Salome Oggenfuss, born in Switzerland, is an artist working across disciplines. Her practice draws on years of experience working as a casting director specializing in discovering first-time performers for film, TV, and the stage. Recent works include collaborations with the Kitchen, the Dia Art Foundation, Montez Press Radio and Canal Projects, and her feature documentary film Role Models played at Anthology Film Archives, Now Instant Image Hall, SARA’s, and more. Oggenfuss lives in Brooklyn.

Image courtesy of Salome Ogenfuss