This teen's Instagram photo catapults her to the league of Rita Ora, Lana Del Ray

This teen's Instagram photo catapults her to the league of Rita Ora, Lana Del Ray

FWS - Reluctantly attending a homecoming festival proved to be a stroke of luck for US teenager Anok Yai. A photo of her taken at the event has landed her a modeling contract with one of the biggest agencies in the country. Talk about being in the right place at the right time.

It all happened when a friend of Yai convinced her to go to a homecoming festival at Howard University in Washington DC, called Yard Fest. The teen bumped into a photographer who thought she should be a model and asked her to pose for a few pictures. This was one of them.

The photo was soon posted on the Instagram account of the photographer as well as Yai's. The 19-year-old’s phone wouldn’t stop buzzing as thousands of people shared and commented on the post. Soon after those vibrations shifted from alerts of compliments to offers from modeling agencies keen to meet with the university student, with some offering to fly her to New York.

Those offers culminated with Yai announcing on Thursday she has signed for the Next Models agency—which has worked with celebrities like Rita Ora, Lana Del Ray, and whose models have appeared on the covers of publications such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. "Thank you to everyone that's supported me along the way; hope you follow me on this journey."

Funny thing is Yai wasn’t even a fan of the photo, saying she thought it made her look like a “deer in headlights” and describing it as “average”.

“When [the Instagram post] got to a couple thousand and it just kept going higher and higher, I was surprised,” she told the Washington Post. “And I was happy. I always wanted it to happen, but it was something I never expected. I got an email from a modeling agency. They said they were interested in having me and they had me call them. And they just set up tons of interviews and it just went on from there.”

Yai, who was born in Egypt and is of Sudanese heritage, moved to the US when she was two years old and grew up in the city of Manchester, in New Hampshire.

Her mother is keen for her to finish her studies, but the family feels she could complete her course online if her nascent modeling career takes off.

Meanwhile, Yai is still stunned by the attention that one photo is receiving. “At first, I questioned what everyone was seeing because I didn’t really see it,” she told the Boston Globe. “Honestly, I think that people get so used to seeing themselves that people don’t see their own beauty because they see it everyday.”(meaww.com)