A digital recreation of an article published in Modern Man magazine Vol16 No12 1967
With a name like Brigitte Cannes, a face like Liz Taylor, and a set of measurements that could give the U.S. Bureau of Weights and Measures an inferiority complex, Modern Man’s cover girl wouldn’t surprise anyone if she were a starlet working toward her big break in films. After all, her first name immediately calls to mind one of the sultriest sex kittens who ever romped across a movie screen, and her last name just happens to be the site of one of the oldest and most venerated film festivals in the world. Brigitte, however, was her Paris-born grandmother’s name while Cannes was the surname and birthplace of her grandfather. So she came upon her provocative appellation quite innocently. As far as a film career goes, that is another story. Brigitte already has a successful "film" career-at least by her own admittedly modest standards-but she hasn’t appeared in any motion pictures. Rather, she makes her living behind a camera-and a still camera, at that.
Brigitte is employed by a large West Coast camera supply distributor to demonstrate photographic equipment-primarily Polaroid cameras. Every week Brigitte appears at a different camera shop, drugstore, etc., shooting free portraits of customers and demonstrating how simple and virtually mistake-proof the cameras are. "I really love my job," Brigitte says. "It’s the kind of job that is impossible to become bored with. Every assignment is new and different. The people I shoot are always happy to receive a nice photograph free and many of them buy a camera because they like the picture I took so much. But there is no pressure on me to sell anything. All my boss told me to do is have fun and look pretty-and that’s just what I do."
And that’s just what she was doing when top Hollywood lensman Ron Vogel entered a camera store to pick up his weekly supply of film. He was amused that he was asked by a beautiful girl to pose for his own portrait. The picture took 60 seconds to develop and that’s about how much time went by before he told her who he was and pointed out the fact that she was being unfair to mankind in general, and hard-working glamour photographers in particular, by not spending some time in front of the camera herself. Brigitte balked at first, but finally decided that the experience would be an interesting one, and the model’s remuneration, of course, also merited favorable consideration. Their shooting session was so great that Vogel still refers to it as the Cannes film festival.
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