Model Sara Ziff on ‘sordid’ snappers

A top American catwalk model has blown the whistle on the "sordid" dark side of fashion in a documentary showing at film festivals. Shooting at fashion parties and behind the scenes of the fashion world, she has put together a riveting expose of what she calls a "predatory environment" in which middle-aged men - mainly photographers - circle like sharks around under-aged and vulnerable models.

In an interview with the Observer, 27-year-old Sara Ziff told how almost every young model she met in the making of Picture Me had a story to tell of being molested by photographers who used the demands of "art" as an excuse to get them to undress.

Many of the girls she interviewed for what began as a simple video diary shot with her then boyfriend Ole Schell asked for their interviews to be cut from the final edit when it developed into a more serious documentary.

One model who agreed to have her interview kept in the film is Sena Cech, who describes a casting session that might have been for a soft-porn film rather than a fashion shoot with one of the world's top fashion photographers.

She was almost immediately asked to strip and then realised that the photographer, who remains nameless, was undressing too. "Baby - can you do something a little sexy," he asked her, before his assistant began egging her on. "Sena, can you grab his cock and twist it real hard," said the assistant.

"I did it," says Cech, shrugging before Ziff's camera. But the following day, when Cech was offered the job, she turned it down - and has never been given work by the photographer again.

"Pretty much every girl I talked to has a story like it," Ziff told the Observer.

Ziff is the daughter of academics who were appalled when she went into modelling at 14. At one of the first casting sessions she attended, in New York, she was asked by the photographer to take her shirt off. "Then he told me that it was still hard to imagine me for the story so could I take my trousers off. I was standing there in a pair of Mickey Mouse knickers and sports bra."

Although Ziff "didn't even have breasts yet", the photographer, who was walking round and round her, looking her up and down without saying anything, wanted to see her without her bra. "I did what he told me to do. I was just eager to be liked and get the job. I didn't know any better."

After more than a decade of catwalk and magazine work, including shoots for such labels as Prada and Calvin Klein, Ziff is still left wondering: "What's the difference between doing a shoot in your underwear for Calvin Klein and being a stripper?" ·