The outdoor photo shoot. A rough, industrial locale offers the perfect backdrop for this uniquely urban marriage of grit and glamour. The scene is always more or less the same: a model poses against a brick wall, a photographer along with a cluster of assistants hover around the camera, some holding reflectors or screens, others simply standing by to make wardrobe or makeup adjustments. To some passersby the scene is a novelty: some pause and gape, others snap photos on their smartphones. Jaded New Yorkers meanwhile – or those living in the neighborhood – pass by without interest, for they’ve witnessed this spectacle many times before, and for them it’s little more than a nuisance. And for the photography team? The public locale, one imagines, is a necessary evil, for lack of control over the conditions of the environment – the weather, potential disruptions such as road work or street cleaning, rubberneckers – make the shoot far less desirable than the studio. But the ‘raw’ qualities of the street corner simply cannot be reproduced with set design, especially given that ‘authenticity’ factors in as an essential component of the photo’s iconographic content.