When Rosie Hardy, just a sweet girl of 15 at the time, was in search for the perfect MySpace picture for her own page, she never could have imagined that search would lead to where it has today. She is, in fact, the girl on the cover of Maroon 5‘s album “Hands All Over”. 
“Photography was really just a hobby for me,” Rosie Hardy said. “Never really in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be discovered by Maroon 5 and it would launch an entire new life for me. I still can’t believe it has happened!”
“It was all a very cliché experience,” Rosie admits, in an interview for Flickr. “I was a fifteen year-old girl, and I really wanted a pretty My Space picture to make the guy I had a crush on fancy me. So I did with a little point-and-shoot camera. But what started off as taking pictures of myself turned into me going outside, getting adventurous and really loving it. I posted them on Flickr and started getting great feedback.”
What happened then was every artist’s dream come true, and she wasn’t even looking for it! In 2010, Maroon 5 was ready to release their newest album “Hands All Over”, but they had a problem. The band did not have a picture for their album cover, so their management team hit the Internet, desperately searching and using the words “Hands All Over”. Immediately came across Rosie’s Flickr page.
“But when I got contacted again, I realized this was legit,” Rosie says. “So I started to follow through and see what I could do.”
Rosie got nude, jumped on her parents’ bed, and took several self-portraits. She posed with hands in her hair, hands in the sky, hands everywhere. She edited it all together and sent it back to the Maroon 5 team. Their response was one she never expected.
“They took a look at it and said, ‘Right, we’re happy with this. No other model needed. It’s going to be you on the cover’,” Rosie says. “I couldn’t believe it. I pretty much fell off my chair when I realized that it was actually happening!”
After the album release, her photo appeared on buses, billboards, and in store windows. It opened up her career from there to many high profile clients and to do the things she has always dreamt of. The extremely talented 19-year-old says she hopes to be the next Annie Leibovitz, but, “As long as I’m taking pictures, I will be happy.”
Image via Flickr
