Beautiful, smart, full of dignity

English

Love – supplement to Arguments and Facts newspaper, February 1997

This girl rebuts the opinion about photo models whose nude pictures decorate magazines for men. These girls are thought to be cute individuals with big breasts and only one straight convolution of the brain. If she were that shallow, it would not be worth the trouble to write about her. It would be enough just to show her photos. But the thing is that before becoming the model she succeeded in many other spheres and she is in many ways a very interesting person. Meet Masha Tarasevich. 

She appeared at the publishing house without any pomp and satellites, modestly dressed and behaved quite friendly. All this contradicted to the general impression of haughty, capricious, spoilt models. However all her gestures showed assurance in her own efforts, her eyes showed dignity, and her voice was so musical that it charmed us. 

Masha Tarasevich was born in Minsk and there she finished a musical school attached to the conservatoire in the class of violin.; when she was 16 she moved to Moscow where she continued her musical education at the Musical Academy named after Gnesins and became a professional singer on finishing it. Her extraordinary vocal in combination with no less extraordinary exterior did not remain unnoticed and Anatoli Kroll, one of patriarch of native jazz invited Masha to his Big-Band. I can assure everybody who has any doubts: Masha's voice and her ability to master it are worth admiring. 

Shooting could not be all pleasure. I suspect that it is a rather hard labor. 

It's not just a hard labor; it's a terribly hard labor. Usually it takes a week to shoot a double page. As a rule they make thousands of pictures, and only one of them is selected out of all. Girls at the shooting area sometimes can't bear strain and weep or fall unconscious. We had even less time and had to work 25 hours a day. So I had to recreate for a week after shooting. 

What's the difference between Masha's appearance in ordinary life and on the pictures of magazines? Did the stylist and the photographer have to do much work to prepare you for shooting? 

It was a big job, of course. Two cases of make-up, oils and creams were brought to Moscow from the United States. But it was done not with the purpose to make me more beautiful than I am in real life. Just high quality shooting demands complicated and careful cosmetic preparations than we need in our everyday life. As for the ratio between my own participation in shooting and the photographer's job, I think it was 50/50. The photographer helped me to develop what was inside me. 

What do you eat with delight? 

Everything. (Laughs). The main thing about food is that it must be fresh. Sometimes I simply like to have a glass of milk with a just baked muffin. I can easily eat the whole pizza – generally speaking, I don't limit myself in eating, but I run in the morning and my mode of life is very mobile. I can have a drink sometimes: Champaign, strong cocktail with rum, whiskey. I think you can have anything; the only important thing is absence of addiction. Therefore my attitude to drugs is negative, drug addiction is fatal. 

Have you any most important task? 

Yes, I have. I want to be a person of the world. I want my country to be at the world level. It is important for me: I love my country and no matter where I am I try to represent it in a worthy manner. 

Boris Muradov