Hattie Watson
The freckles are the first thing. Red hair helps, but it’s the freckles that make you keep looking. She’s known this since school when people gave her shit about them, and she knows it now that they’re the first thing you notice in her photographs. More advantage than disadvantage, she told me. The diplomatic answer, which really means: yes, I know exactly what I have.
She came to modeling by accident. Wanted to do it as a kid, picked sports instead. Later she worked at a photography studio and a photographer asked her to model. By then she already had strong opinions about what she would do and what she wouldn’t, which is rare at any age and especially at twenty-four. She’s done fashion work, implied nudity, full nude shoots. She’s pulling back from the nude stuff now because there’s only so much of it before it gets stale. She wants editorial work, designer collaborations, magazine covers—the kind of shooting where what matters is composition and movement and the shape of her in a frame.
The men who see her pictures get excited about it. She gets emails. She finds it funny mostly. I asked if it bothered her, and she said something I keep thinking about: really anything stimulates men, they’re men, she could wear a sweater and smoke a cigarette and get the same response. Nudity isn’t even the main event. Everyone has their particular thing and most of it has nothing to do with being naked.
She has nine tattoos, none of them especially meaningful. First one on her stomach: Go big or go home.
So perfectly Texas that it circles back to something true. She wants both arms done eventually, a vulture on her thigh.
Her music taste—Tom Waits, Cat Power, Band of Horses, Bon Iver, Beirut, Air—is the taste of someone who knows what she likes and doesn’t need to perform it. She hasn’t watched many movies lately. Cashback and Me Without You stuck with her. She’d rather be home on her computer with video games than at most parties, though she goes out anyway to dance with actual friends. That introvert thing—you’d rather be alone but you do it anyway because your people matter.
She’s traveled the States coast to coast, just got to London. Nothing too wild happened. A fight with some guy in Seattle once. She could see herself in Europe eventually, maybe London, but she hasn’t been there long enough to know. What she loves about America is the landscape constantly shifting and the weather.
Her fans matter to her—not as something to perform gratitude about, but as a straight fact. They’re why any of this works. The work itself is what she cares about. The perfect shoot would be minimal or totally strange and eerie, something where a beautiful girl is doing something unexpected. Ugly photographs of gorgeous people.
She doesn’t speechify about the industry or womanhood or anything like that. She knows her own boundaries and moves toward what interests her and away from what doesn’t. That’s the whole thing with her.