Henry Tibensky

“My first job was being a Seventeen boy,” recalls Henry Tibensky of his first modeling gig, in a feature for Seventeen magazine. “A group of girls are running after me down a street in Queens. That was my first shoot and I didn’t know what to expect. No one taught me anything. No one told me what was going to happen. They dropped me off on a street corner with all these girls there. And I had no idea that it was going to be an eight-hour shoot in Queens, running up and down the street with all these girls chasing me, yelling, 'Henry, Henry!'”


Ultimately, being thrown into the proverbial pool is nothing new for Henry, himself a lifelong swimmer. He sports a hardcore lifestyle of diving in head first, even when attempting something rather off-the-Great-Wall, like heading to China to teach English to six-year-olds.

“I didn’t speak one word of Chinese,” he says of that experience. “In fact, it didn’t occur to me until I was on the flight over.” And with that swimmer’s mentality doggy paddling throughout his life, he states, “I’ve always gone with the flow. I sort of find my way while experiencing. I try to move forward.”

That included giving the modeling world the old college try.

A native of Oak Park, Illinois (he attended the same high school as Ernest Hemingway and Dan Castellenata, the voice of Homer Simpson), he was scouted on campus while studying poly-sci at Yale. Before long, he was cramming for finals while on the train to castings and auditions in Manhattan.

His Nordic good looks were a no-brainer for the magazine feature editors and the commercial casting directors; he was booking immediately, covering the spectrum from the shallow end (tiny feature stories) to the deep end (major advertising for serious advertisers like Redken hair products).

“Redken was the biggest campaign that I did,” he recalls. “It was a great shoot. It was great to get pampered for the day. They gave me a million dollar haircut! The only problem is that they’re still using the picture four years later!”

He also dabbled in acting (he was up for a role on a soap), but he recalls now, “I enrolled in Stella Adler classes for about three months. It was brief and it wasn’t enough. It’s a tough business, and you really have to know how to do it well to make it big. “

That often involves a high dive on a gusty day, where many others don’t have the guts to venture up the ladder.

“I’m always excited to do something new, something exciting,” he says. “I’ve always been interested in new things but I never really dreamt of one particular thing. I have always juggled a lot of different activities and that’s where modeling came in.”

Although he was captain of his water polo team, and excelled as a varsity swimmer and baseball player, nothing quite prepared him for the bizarro world of modeling.

He says, “My whole life, I had a baseball coach or I had a teacher teaching me [his mom, in fact, is a Spanish teacher]. With modeling, you just get thrust into this whole world that you have no idea about and you just have to do what you’re supposed to do while at the very same time figuring out how to do it.

“When I first began, I didn’t understand how to model and I didn’t understand how the business worked. And that was the toughest part for me, not understanding the in’s and out’s of the business. Some of the other guys understood the biz and took it much more seriously than I did. That’s part of my regret that I didn’t take it seriously enough.”

His modeling career was short-lived, but he racked up a number of credits that other male models might only dream of. And although he has not ruled out another shot at the modeling big-time, for this particular lap he would make his re-entry being a bit older and wiser, but still very commercially viable.

“You’re selling a product,” he says. “You’re a salesman. You have to realize that is what you are doing. Until you realize that, you are never going to do great work. You’re never going to get all the jobs. You really have to leave all your worries and inhibitions at the door and take on a unique character. You really have to visualize what you’re going to do before you do it. And at the same time, you have to work with the people around you, the photographer, the client, the agent and listen to them and try to adapt to what they’re telling you. People should really, really know what they’re getting into when they get into it.”

Regrets? He’s had a few, but then again, too few to mention.

“Of course, I wish I knew back then what I know now,” he says, “One of my biggest regrets was not going all out for the acting and the modeling. I really wish I had gone all out and given it my all. I wish I would have a had a goal in mind, focused on that goal, and realized that modeling and acting could have been a career, or even a career for a short time. It takes a lot of work and discipline to do it well. Yes, there is a lot of fun that goes with it. Parties, ladies. But you have to treat it like a profession if you're going to make it one."

His bright flash of realization came not in the noisy hustle and bustle of New York, but in faraway China, where they were wild about Henry and his “exotic” look for print advertising.

“I went to China on a whim. My friend told me, ‘Henry, you’d love Shanghai.’ So there I went,” he says. “I took some of my headshots and my New York modeling portfolio. In Shanghai, western models still have a lot of clout. The Chinese still respect our culture and America as a whole so it was fairly easy to start landing jobs. I emailed a few contacts with my headshots and pretty soon I was doing a runway show and some print work. I loved Shanghai and China so much, that I canceled my flight home and stayed for another six months.”

It was in this city of 12 million to 16 million people (the government’s not quite sure) where he learned to work the camera.

“My best shoot was the very last shoot I did, when I was living in Shanghai,” he says. “For some reason, it just clicked; it was like a mini-epiphany where all of the sudden I just understood how to model. I forgot that the lense was there, but instead worked with the people in the room.”

For now, he busies himself with legal work in Manhattan, and this is where he’ll stay – for now.

“New York,” he muses, “I don’t know. Something always pulls you back in. New York is so efficient, so vibrant. Everybody is so good at what they do. It’s easy to live your whole life with such efficiency. You can go 100 blocks in fifteen minutes. You can get a slice of pizza at four in the morning. You can do your Christmas shopping without having to get in a car. There’s a magnetism here and maybe that’s why this is the first time I’ve been in one place for more than eight or nine months.”

For Henry, that’s about as quick as a New York minute. And often the window of opportunity for modeling is even quicker.

He says, “What they judge you on is a thirty-second pose for a Polaroid.”

Yet one more lap in the pool is still a possibility, since the first time around, the water was fine.

“I would never rule it out,” he says. “Who knows? Next week is a new week.”