Low pay, no credit

Drawing by Martin Robinson

Life modelling is not lucrative. But from time to time you see/hear of things which are truly ludicrous.
Just to clarify: life modelling is what you do when you pose naked for artists and (mostly) art students. I am a life model, as well as a photographic model. I have been doing life modelling for years and years, with gaps of course; I took up photographic modelling much later in life.
Whereas you can do time for prints/cd if you are a photographic model, that arrangement never works for life models. Time for sketches is only worth your while if you pose for someone like Lucien Freud. Who wants to have hundreds of mediocre drawings by would be artists in exchange for what is basically a difficult and very tiring job - try to keep still for just 5 minutes, if you dont believe me.
So life modelling is always or should always be PAID. Having said that, life models are given absolute peanuts and it really makes you wonder.
I am a RAM member, the Register for Artists Models, which has done a great job in terms of campaigning for a minimum pay (at the princely sum of £12.50 per hour). I also have an Equity card - not all life models do but model Lucy Saunders who started a model list a couple of years ago first mentioned that possibility for life models and I went ahead and got one. Photographic agency models get an Equity card through their agency, internet models hardly know what it is, unless they happen to be performers as well.

Photographer: George Swift

The Equity card works for me not so much in terms of ensuring a minimum pay because that cannot be enforced in this kind of work but to give me a proof of ID without making me  produce passport and other documents, which show my real name. Equity allows you to use a stage name and it is perfectly acceptable to use your stage name on model releases and such like, I can  show my Equity card and give my Equity number and my real identity is protected. I like keeping things separate.
This is a long and tedious prologue but we have come to the point, thanks for bearing with me. Yesterday Lucy sent the list an announcement about a job for Monday put by the artist in an Arts Council of England newsletter (and you must read the spiel about unpaid opportunities given by ACE on the front page!). The ad was for a model/performer between 5'7 and 5'11 in height, male or female, slim built,  who would be PERFORMING on  stage for two hours wearing a costume provided by the artist and doing standing poses of at least 15 minutes duration, one after the other, as part of a performance piece involving life modelling. The model -performer would not receive any credit (!) on any publicity and would be paid £20 including travel expenses. Of course for the model- performer it would be more than two hours work: he/she would have to arrive at least an hour in advance of the performance to get in costume, to discuss what they were doing, - so the artist was  really asking for at least 3 hours time.  As Lucy pointed out to all of us on the list, £20 for 3 hours including travelling expenses works out at £4.30 an hour if you take off £7 for travelling peak time on a travelcard - such are London travel costs.
I have done jobs as an extra - extras are not credited - but for a lot more money than that. Moreover  this job is not for an extra. It is a fairly major role. Why on earth should the model/performer not be credited?

All right, I hear you: models are never credited by painters/sculptors. Sure. But they are paid for the session. In fact modelling privately for an artist is the best arrangement as the model is free to ask the artist  for a figure that suits both (but before you start thinking in terms of a three figure sum let me disabuse you of this notion - it will never be over £20 per hour).
This is a performance and there are different rules that apply to performers - or do they?
I could say a lot more but I will stop for now. Low pay, no credit: this seems to be the lot of the life model.

(Photo modelled by AlexB.)