A feature documentary about everyday photo habitués who traverse the streets of New York and Paris in pursuit of models to snap pictures of outside fashion shows. They are frequenters of an outside, birdwatchers of female beauty, gleaners – picking up images at the margins, at the gates of patronized culture.

Driven by adoration and loneliness, the men in the film aren’t in it for the money, but are spurred on by the prospect of capturing transient interactions with the models to collect, in a hunt for images to take back home to their off-season hibernacula.  In this image-coded world, they exist in ways that are equally social, para-social, and anti-social.

The film is about Longing in a culture of distantiating transparency and the mediated image, about the desire that got misplaced along the road somewhere.  It’s a phenomenology of the outside: about those who don’t get to (and perhaps don’t even want to) exist on the inside—who don’t wear the badge of officialdom or the wristband of admittance.

Operationally, it is a verité documentary that is turning itself upside down; a patchwork of characters; about men who look at women, men looking at women.  It would not pass a reverse Bechtel Test.  Retired after 30 years, one of the characters assesses his current passion like this: ‘They ask John Dillinger why do you rob banks?  And he told them, ‘because that’s where the money is.  And why do you photograph female models?  Well, that’s where the beauty is.’

Q+A with director Salome Oggenfuss