The Cut - Karen Elson Is Going It Alone

On a photo shoot a few years ago, Karen Elson, the flame-haired, ghost-pale English model, was put into a tank of water meant to suggest the sea. But the water, a dull greenish-gray, wasn’t as photogenic as she was. Faced with the dreary intrusion of reality getting in the way of the shot, someone on the set got the idea that maybe dumping in a few bottles of bleach might help.

“My eyes are burning, my skin is on fire,” Elson recalls from her home in Nashville. “I get out and I can’t see. I hit my wall. I got in the car and went straight to the emergency room. And simultaneously I had my agent at the time calling me saying, ‘Oh my God, we need to send flowers’” — to the client.

“That shoot wasn’t an anomaly,” she adds. “There’s plenty of other situations I’ve been put in where I feel like a product on the conveyor belt. It’s not really about me.”

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