In the early 1990s, photographer Kathy Anderson snapped photos of Jenny Joseph, a British graphic artist with no prior modeling experience, during an impromptu photoshoot. Artist Michael Deas later transformed the images of the 28-year-old into the Torch Lady, the figurehead of the modern-day Columbia Pictures logo. Although she never modeled again, Joseph's image from that 1992 session in a French Quarter apartment is still recognized worldwide today.
The story of how they got Joseph for the shoot is interesting. Deas commissioned Anderson for the job and she soon found the unlikely model working at the same newspaper.
Anderson was working at the time as a photographer for the local newspaper, The Times-Picayune, and when the time came to scout for models, she explains that Deas wasn't having much success. One of her Times-Picayune colleagues suggested Joseph, then 28, who was working as a graphic artist for the publication.
Joseph was in the right place at the right time. The first-time model agreed to help Anderson during an impromptu lunch break.
"They wrapped a sheet around me and I held a regular little desk lamp, a side lamp," Joseph recalled of that day during a 2012 interview with 4WWL. (Joseph, who never modeled again, declined to speak to Yahoo for this story.) "I just held that up and we did that with a light bulb."
"She turned out to be perfect," Anderson tells Yahoo Entertainment of Joseph, recalling the day she transformed her New Orleans home for the shoot.
See outtakes from the shoot at Anderson's website.
