“I’m not a writer.” The model Malgosia Bela is taking great pains to drive home this point. We are on a Zoom to discuss Winter Girl, her new book that gathers 100 memorable images from a career that’s spanned over two decades (and counting). It’s a gorgeous tome that includes photographs of Bela taken by many of the greatest photographers of our time, but what makes it stand out among other fashion coffee table books is the fact that it’s anchored by her writing. Her prose is steady but self-deprecating, precise but friendly, and it quickly brings you into her world. Take the book’s introduction, where she explains the “Winter Girl” of it all. After not getting confirmed for a slew of jobs in the summer, she begins to worry.
But she doubles down. “I’m going to say that again, I am not a writer.” She says that even though the text came first, and even though her process is suspiciously close to that of every writer ever. (“It cost me a lot to actually sit down on my ass and write things. You can be sure I will clean the entire house, I will do laundry, I will do everything that I don’t need to do before I sit down and write.”)
Though the 46-year old model never kept a diary, she did have a best friend, Filip Niedenthal—who also happens to be the publisher of Winter Girl— whom she told “everything” to throughout the years. “Filip has this kind of weird geeky memory, and somehow we both remembered the stories from over two decades ago,” she explains. Although the stories are of her life, they are of her life as a model, with glimpses of her personal life seeping through. “The stories [in the book] say something about the photographers, my relationship to them, and my admiration and love of that whole process of creating images,” Bela adds. “I didn’t want it to be a biography. First of all, I’m still alive and I’m not that big a model—I’m not a supermodel of the 1990s or the 1980s. I’ve been in this business for 25 years, through the analog and the digital world, and I’ve witnessed all these changes. It’s a tribute to artists and to this world.”
There are 10 essays, on, among other things: getting started in modeling, almost getting attacked by wild animals (and photographers), young boyfriends who actually don’t let you down, working with Tim Walker and bringing her son along for the magical ride, not working with Irving Penn but loving him anyway, and working with Richard Avedon and loving him and using his material for her thesis when she finished her masters in Cultural Anthropology. The images are not in chronological order, but rather they relate to each text and then sort of go from there, extending like little branches on a tree.
Although the project began in part as a result of her son leaving for college, she found a new part of herself in the process, especially as she began reaching out to the photographers to secure rights for all the images. “When it came to the biggest photographers, I was writing emails myself and it kind of blew my mind how positive and friendly the reactions were; it was all, ‘Wow, this is amazing, of course, take whatever you need!’,” she recalls. “And it was a nice feeling because I wasn’t aware of that relationship, I wasn’t aware of how I was valued by the photographers as a model—I mean, I knew I worshipped them—but it was a nice feeling. It confirmed that this book was a tribute.”
