I’ve just finished reading a review copy of a terrific forthcoming book: You Wanna Be on Top?: A Memoir of Makeovers, Manipulation, and Not Becoming America’s Next Top Model by Sarah Hartshorne. Hartshorne was a contestant on America’s Next Top Model in 2007. She placed eighth.

You Wanna Be on Top? is more than a dishy tell-all about Tyra Banks and the producers of Top Model. It’s also a wise, literate, and funny book. Reading it reinforced something I’ve known for a while: Models are cool people. They are very often smart, often self-deprecating, and have a much keener sense of honor than pundits, producers, or politicians.

I learned this 10 years ago when I fell into a gig photographing models. Every summer there was an event in Washington called the D.C. Pool Party. Basically it was a bunch of beautiful people in the D.C. area getting together at a hotel pool near the Capitol. I was there investigating a political story when the host approached me. He noticed I had an expensive professional camera and a notebook. Was I a photographer? Journalist, I answered. He explained that his regular photographer had canceled on him last minute and he needed pictures for promotional use. Could I do it? He offered $500. Naturally, I did it.

He loved the pictures, I met some of the beautiful people, and the next thing I knew I was making some good side money as a part-time photographer. Yes, everybody has a cell phone these days and everybody takes pictures. Yet the difference between an iPhone snap and a professionally lit or composed shot taken with a $5,000 Canon camera remains profound.

Some of the people I shot went on to bigger things—commercials, small movie parts, music. There was Shaina Scott, a gorgeous and smart model and singer who went on American Idol and made it into the top 10. I shot her in black and white and they are still some of my favorite photographs. I also shot Miss Latina D.C., who became a friend—and was among those who stuck up for me during a political hit.

It sounds crazy, but I actually paid these models more than America’s Next Top Model did—at least according to Hartshorne. Hartshorne became a plus-sized model after the show, but her experience left her jaded. “The fact is the reality television industry and the fashion industry are deeply toxic,” she writes. They are “harmful industries where old, rich men take young, beautiful women and treat them like they are disposable. Top Model was at the nexus of both, and contestants bore the brunt of the damage. So how do we go about changing that? Paying talent for their time and labor.” 

It’s a good point. According to Hartshorne, models on the show were not paid while they were simultaneously being manipulated to exaggerate certain dramatic or comedic parts of their personalities. Hartshorne quotes Emily Nussbaum, author of Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV, who wrote that reality TV producers are “the slimy beneficiaries of anti-labor tactics, funded by executives who didn’t want to pay writers and actors.” Hartshorne: “As someone on the receiving end of those slimy tactics, I can assure you being paid would have helped. Exploitation really hits different when you’re also not being paid for it.”

Hartshorne also regrets the way she let the Top Model producers mock her small-town upbringing. Hartshorne had worked on a blueberry farm, a job she loved, but found herself playing along when asked to pretend she thought such a job was ridiculous:

“Great, Sarah, thank you so much. So do you like being a simple farm girl on the blueberry farm?” Without hesitation I said, “Ew, no. I do not like working on the blueberry farm. I don’t want to just be a simple farm girl. I want to be so much more than that.” None of that was true. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I pictured the smiling, bearded face of the kind, older gay man who owned the farm. The warm, cozy inside of his house looked like it was out of a 1970s Architectural Digest and smelled like tahini, apple cider vinegar, and soil. I remembered feeling like such a grown-up as I drank my coffee in my travel mug and looked out over the rolling, rocky umber hills. They’d turned that reddish-orange color because the farmers set controlled fires every few years to encourage more fruit growth, a tradition that dated back to before the land was colonized by Europeans.

Hartshorne grew up in a town of 635 people in Massachusetts. Modeling appealed to her from an early age. On a coffee table in that house was a copy of Norman Mailer’s Of Women and Their Elegance. “I flipped through it over and over and over,” she writes, “Someday, I thought, I’ll be the type of person who gets to live in the world on these pages. I’ll wear designer clothes in my New York City apartment.”

She accomplished all of those things and is now a married mother and a comedian. Looking back, her verdict on the show is unsparing:

Top Model brought a lot of people a lot of joy, both audiences and participants. And that is beautiful and undeniably good. It also harmed a lot of people. It caused equally undeniable pain and trauma. Acknowledging one truth does not negate the other. Both can (and do) exist at the same time. The producers were trying to make good television. At any cost. And by refusing to acknowledge for so many years that there was any ill intent, even if the tactics they used “to make good television” were the same ones used by cult leaders to inspire obedience, I could avoid facing the truth. They took our phones and watches, and they prohibited newspapers, televisions, clocks, or anything that told us what day or time it was. They removed all of our agency and kept us on edge by withholding food, sleep, and access to bathrooms. It pains me to say it, but it would be impossible for the producers, including Tyra, not to see the damage they were doing.

That behavior is awful, and it’s also counterproductive. I grew up surrounded by writers and photographers for National Geographic, where my father worked, and I learned valuable lessons from them. Treat your subjects with respect. If it’s a commercial gig, always pay the talent, even if it’s just a friend. Buy them lunch and pay for their cab. Just be a good person. You will get great pictures in return.

One of the craziest things that happened to me as a photographer was the time I got pulled over with one of my models in the car. It was in Maryland, just after we had done a shoot at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s grave. It turned out that my driver’s license had been suspended due to a single unpaid $40 ticket from Bethany Beach, Delaware. I couldn’t drive and would have to straighten things out with the MVA. Worse, I was driving a VW Jetta with a manual transmission—a stick shift. There was no way, I thought to myself, the woman beside me was going to be able to drive us home. I was about to call an UBER when she held her hand out as if to say, “Stop!” “I can drive stick,” she said. “I grew up in southern Virginia, and my dad always said that there are two things a woman should know: how to fire a gun, and how to drive stick.”

The point is you just never know about people. Treat them well. Even a model might surprise you.