On the Campus - February 23, 2000
Once a model, now a student with
a photography business
Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri '01 schedules her classes around her work
Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri '01 is not a typical Princeton junior. She entered the university five years after she finished high school and after working as a fashion model. And she's still involved in the fashion world, as the cofounder of Cyborg, a New York-based fashion photography and photo retouching business. Her clients include the Maybelline cosmetics company, Camel cigarettes, and Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines.
"It can be really hard," says Pal-Chaudhuri of her work with
Cyborg. "The times when business is picking up and we have a lot of
jobs that need my attention seem to be the same times when all my class
assignments come due. The week before the Dean's Date deadline for fall
semester written work, I had to go to Paris for a perfume campaign. I had
all my books with me on the shoot, and whenever there was a break in the
action I'd read for a few minutes, or write a sentence of a paper."
It was when Pal-Chaudhuri was working as a model in Paris that she cofounded Cyborg, which was named after the part human, part machine-made creatures prevalent in science fiction. After learning the art of photography, she became interested in the way photographs could be digitally altered, especially to create specific artistic effects. Working with another photographer, she began using retouchers, and would sit with them at the screen during the process and discuss the alterations she felt would look best.
After Pal-Chaudhuri made the decision to matriculate at Princeton, she and her partner moved the company to New York and brought along one of the digital artists they'd worked with in Paris. As the business grew, they hired several more.
An anthropology major, Pal-Chaudhuri lives at Princeton Monday through Wednesday, the days that she has scheduled her classes, and in New York the rest of the week.
"It wasn't always like this. Three years ago, my freshman year at Princeton, I was always able to schedule work around my classes. Now we've become much busier, and it's the other way round. My classes are all packed into two and a half days a week."
Even with her long, and frequent, absences from campus, Pal-Chaudhuri makes sure that her work interferes with her academic life as little as possible. Very few of her teachers or fellow students are aware of her activities in the fashion world.
"A few of my professors know," she says, "but the fashion industry is something that many people in academia have negative views of. A lot of what I'm doing with Cyborg is perfecting models and creating a completely unattainable human form.
"If you've been in this business as long as I have, you understand that nobody is expected to really look like that. The standard is unattainable to begin with, and it's not the fault of the fashion people that some people choose to devote their lives to pursuing that. People who are busy doing things that keep them engaged intellectually, pursuing things that make them happy, they don't feel these kinds of pressures to measure themselves against an impossible standard of physical perfection."
Pal-Chaudhuri is philosophical about some of the accusations leveled at her chosen field. "To me, it's a purely artistic thing. It's all in the spirit of taking away things that detract from the intensity of the expression or the personality. To improve someone's skin, to rearrange the flow of a dress, to change a hand or a gesture where the photograph looks awkward as an art piece, it can become something extremely beautiful."
So, how does Pal-Chaudhuri feel about being such a nontraditional student in a place where the total undergraduate experience, with its eating clubs, its sports events, its unique culture, holds such high priority for most students and alumni?
"I've loved it at Princeton," says Pal-Chaudhuri. "I'm very glad I came here. I only wish I'd had time to have a more normal social life, to join a club, to go to some of the extra lectures. I do feel very schizophrenic sometimes, but it all seems to work out in the end."
Katherine Zoepf is copresident of the Press Club.
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