herr_0berst | Apr. 9th, 2007

The picture of "Snejana Onopka before the fame" was published by Russian tabloid PaparaZZi in March-April/2007 issue №25. It didn't take long for the net community to trace the picture back to the set from Hegre Archives [wiki] featuring "Zhanna" and dating back to 2003, in fact there are multiple sets totaling over a hundred of pictures [posted].

As far as I'm concerned, the question still persists whether or not Zhanna = Snejana Onopka? There is of course a striking resemblance, though the fashion model Onopka has a much more slender body, than the girl in the pictures, but the features still seem to match. Besides that Zhanna is one of the possible short forms of Snejana.

The administrator of the Shock Models forum lilechka6 has made a claim [www], that she is responsible for the positive identification of the person in the picture as "Snezhana Onopko" and has in fact demanded the credit from the PararaZZi publication. I'm not sure if PaparaZZi should indeed credit Shock Models, but it would definitely be nice to mention the picture's origin as one of the Hegre publications, rather than call it an amateur photo "made totally for free". One of course can argue that Hegre's work is indeed of an amateur quality, though it is 100% commercial and models are definitely being paid for posing.

Speaking of Hegre-Art, it has (just like all other publications of this sort) a disclaimer that "models were 18 years of age or older when photographed". Snejana Onopka was born 15/Dec/1986, which makes her 16 y.o. in 2003, which could be a problem, though I seriously doubt that Hegre's staff is being very particular about checking the actual age of their models.

At any rate there is a lot of trash-talk going on on the net right now, e.g. lj.maxur.comments, models.talk /in Russian/.