Daily Inspiration Quote by Helena Christensen

Christensen’s line quietly refuses the old supermodel myth: that beauty is something you simply are, not something you study. The “visual side of things” is her day job, sure, but she’s also signaling authorship. A model is typically treated as the image’s raw material, the surface a photographer, editor, and brand will “use later.” She flips that pipeline. She’s the one taking Polaroids, collecting her own reference library, turning fleeting impressions into assets.

Polaroids matter here because they’re anti-gloss. They’re immediate, imperfect, tactile - a medium historically used for proofs, casting tests, backstage documentation. By choosing that format, she aligns herself with process rather than product. The subtext is control: an archive she makes for herself, not one made about her. “Things that strike me” is doing work too. It frames her eye as active, even hungry, not merely receptive to being looked at.

There’s also an era-specific context. Christensen came up in the 1990s, when fashion’s machinery was peaking and models were both celebrities and commodities. Claiming photography isn’t just a hobby; it’s a way of stepping out from under the camera’s authority. She’s describing a survival skill in an industry built on extraction: you learn to see the world, and yourself, with enough intention that you can “perhaps use later” what would otherwise just pass through you.