$125 Isn't Enough to Be the Smirking Face of Hipsterdom

Alexander Abad-Santos 2,112 Views Aug 7, 2012

A word of warning to our beautiful and financially desperate readers: Unless you're willing to live with being the face of something terrible like "hipsters," think twice before posing for any stock photographs. "Ultimate nightmare: in 2007 Julio and I got paid to do some cheesy stock photoshoot for Getty," tweeted Brooklyn resident "Heather D." last night. "And now the photo is in the NY Post as the face of (disgusting) modern day hipsters. MORTIFIED!"

To be more specific, The Post story, by Michaelangelo Matos, is entitled "Attack of the hipsters: How they ‘ruined’ Williamsburg" and it ran on Sunday. Clearly, the joke here is that no hipster or person in his or her right mind would want to be labeled a hipster (it violates some hipster code to call a hipster a hipster), but that's the beauty of stock photos where models sign away the rights to their images (no matter how ridiculous the clothing may be) and journalists, magazines, websites, and ad agencies gobble them up. As bad as stock photos can be at ruining your cred (hipster or otherwise), they're especially helpful to art departments when they're having a hard time finding hipsters for a story written about seven years too late or finding the face of a generation of unemployed youths or finding the perfect amputee... You get the picture.

Anyway, Heather has cleared the air with Gothamist's Jen Carlson, explaining: "We did it in 2007—someone on the street in SoHo offered my boyfriend Julio $125 an hour to do some stock photos for Getty Images," D. said. If anything it shows how easy it is to co-opt the hipster movement (terrible hat, bangs, and fighting every urge to be presentable), and some could even argue there's a meta-ness to this as Heather herself could be a hipster and not even know it (check out her Twitter and her use of Instagram and be your own judge). "We were going to work on ruining some good beaches this summer but I think we were a little late on Ft Tilden and The Rockaways so I bought a car and we decided to head further up Long Island to Robert Moses/Fire Island where we've been slowly infiltrating all summer," she jokingly tells Gothamist. Well, we think she's joking anyway.

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