He took the parts of his camera from the case, twisting the cool metal lens until it snapped into place. His movements were quick and reflexive, like a soldier assembling a gun. He had started taking photos in quick succession, to check the lights and the set-up. It settled him, being reminded of how the camera could give attention to things, ordinary things, objects which are usually given little regard.
He set the camera up on a tripod and held the lens in his hand until he felt it turn warm. He always waited for this moment, when his camera felt like an extension of his own hands. The camera made a crunch when he pushed the button down; there was something so certain about that sound. The jolt of the flash each time he pressed the button, striking the walls with its white, sanitised light. No matter what else was happening in his life, he could always count on what the camera would do; it would always take the world, flip it upside down and restore it again the right way up on paper.
He’d asked Pippa to arrive at ten, to give him time to set up and talk to the assistant he’d hired for the day, a woman who had been recommended to him by a photographer he’d been in a group show with. He would need her to monitor the laptop for the test shots on the digital camera, changing the film in his camera, holding up light screens and moving lights. But fifteen minutes early, he heard a knock on the metal roller door to the studio, the clash of metal as the door shook in its frame.
‘Hi,’ Pippa said, standing with a hand on her hip, her sunglasses still covering her eyes. Pippa was not much taller than her daughter and from a distance, in a certain light, the two of them might have been sisters. Phoebe was wearing jeans, standing behind her mother, and when she emerged, he noticed something new about her, an expression that hid some submerged anger that must have been directed at him. This was the conflict people felt when they had their photograph taken: curious to see an image of themselves, yet aware that a camera isn’t always kind.
‘I’m afraid today and tomorrow could be very boring for you,’ he said to Phoebe as he led them into the studio. ‘Photography is a lot of fiddling. Taking the picture is actually the quickest part. And you should drink as much water as you can because the lights can be hot to stand under.’ He unscrewed the plastic lid from a bottle of water and handed it to her. She hesitated before she took it from him.
The assistant arrived ten minutes late, a short, sturdy woman with dark hair. She was carrying a large coffee in her hand. When he shook her hand, her grip was firm. He directed her to the laptop, then produced the dress he had chosen for Phoebe. The dress had a low neckline. He had the idea that he would include her shoulders in the shot; he wanted to expose the tenderness of her young skin.
Phoebe and Pippa went to the bathroom together so Phoebe could get changed and a wave of nerves took hold of him; he was aware of how easy it would be for things to go wrong. The difference between success and failure in his profession was a very fine line.
Pippa came out first. She moved close to him and spoke in a low voice. ‘So, you are going to give us the chance to look at the photographs first, aren’t you? Before they’re exhibited?’ Her voice rose in pitch as she spoke.
He nodded. ‘I can give you a week, but then I’ll need to send them to my gallery. The exhibition is in March and I can’t keep the gallery waiting.’
‘Okay, a week should be enough time to decide.’ She turned her head as Phoebe walked out of the bathroom. The girl had her hands folded over her chest.
‘Is it the right size?’ he asked.
‘It’s a bit baggy,’ Pippa said, straightening the dress across Phoebe’s shoulders from behind.
‘That’s okay, I can fix it with clips at the back,’ he said.
‘It looks gay,’ Phoebe said, looking at the concrete floor with the hostility of a person who resents doing something they don’t understand. In her eyes were needles of doubt.
‘Phoebe!’ Pippa said. ‘Sorry, she picks up that sort of language from school.’
‘Do you mind?’ he said, moving towards her. ‘I’ll pull the tags off.’ He placed a hand on her shoulder and felt her melt beneath him, like a small animal that offers no resistance to being held. He broke the plastic tags in his hands.
‘Take a seat on the stool there if you wouldn’t mind, Phoebe,’ he said.
In her dress, under the lights, her limbs were pale, skinny and as supple as green wood.
‘Okay, Phoebe, could you put your hands on your lap for me?’ He demonstrated for her.
She arranged her hands, but she still looked prim, like someone who should have been wearing a shirt buttoned all the way up to her chin.
‘I’ll take a few test shots. The light will be quite bright at first.’ There was a blitz from the strobe and the slow whine of the recharge. He checked the test shots on his laptop behind him.
‘I need to sharpen the focus,’ he said over his shoulder to the assistant, who was kneeling in front of the laptop.
He closed the aperture down and focused on Phoebe’s eyes.
‘Okay, looking at the floor for me,’ he said. ‘And push your shoulders back.’
She sat slumped, the way all self-conscious children did, defending herself against the world. Phoebe looked towards her mother and then did what he’d asked. He took a few shots that way. While he was talking to his assistant again, checking the pictures on the larger screen, Pippa had moved closer to Phoebe. He stepped back behind the camera and her presence in front of the lens sent a ripple of annoyance through him. He was so used to being in control of the situation.
‘Okay, Phoebe, could you look over to the right for me? At the wall and then slowly turn your head and look at the camera.’
She looked at her mother again.
‘It’s okay, Phoeb,’ Pippa said. He could hear the strain in her voice as she tried to sound reassuring.
When he was back behind the lens he saw again why he wanted to photograph the girl. The left side of her face drooped, as though that half of her face had been anaesthetised, but the other side of her face remained unaffected. He thought whatever it was that made her face that way must have happened when she was young, because she didn’t appear to be aware of it. Her eyes were green rather than hazel, a colour without impurity, like glass held against light.
The sound of the flash recharging whined in the room, a piercing sound like a defibrillator, resonating somewhere deep in his ear. He had come to dread that sound, the sound of expectation, of the camera waiting for him to take the next photograph, for his next moment of inspiration.
It was difficult work that day. Phoebe’s expression was reluctant; she looked at the camera as though she suspected it of wanting to cause her harm.
‘Okay, could you just relax your face for me?’ he said. When the right half of her face tensed it gave her a strange, slanted appearance. ‘And look at the lens like you’re looking straight through me and pretend I’m not here at all.’ She smiled self-consciously. He stood and felt a twinge in his lower back. He tried not to allow his frustration to show.
‘Now stand up,’ he said. ‘And just let your arms flop out. Shake your legs and relax. Pretend we aren’t even in a studio, pretend we’re at home. In your lounge room.’ She smiled and looked at Pippa, who nodded.
Around twelve he stopped, clapped his hands and said, ‘Okay, who’s hungry? Should we go out and get some lunch?’ He wanted them to eat together, to share simple food and ordinary, lunchtime conversation. He would ask Phoebe about school and try to ascertain if she had any sense of the way the world saw her. He would muster his charm and try to find some way to make her trust him.
But Pippa looked at Phoebe carefully after he spoke, as though she could see something in her that he could not, some small, invisible complaint. The silent communication that takes place between a parent and child, flowing on the currents of their moods. He thought of how his own mother knew him, but also chose not to know him, of the things she understood about him that no-one else knew and of what she wilfully overlooked.
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br /> ‘I think I’ll take Phoebe down to Broadway. We’ll get some sushi while we’re there. She likes sushi. I need to buy some groceries anyway.’ He took his wallet from his pocket and tried to give her some money for their lunch, but Pippa refused to take it.
He stayed at the studio and didn’t eat lunch. He rarely ate when he was taking photographs, existing instead in a state of heightened anxiety. His assistant went out and came back with a sandwich.
When Phoebe and her mother came back after lunch he continued working, but by three in the afternoon, Phoebe started to yawn and slouch and he knew that he had pushed her as far as he could that day. Her posture became tight, drawing in on herself. Ordinarily this was the part of the day when his shots started to work, the models relaxed and the threat of what the camera might take from them receded to the back of their minds.
‘Okay, Phoebe,’ he said and stood. His lower back felt stiff and he continued to feel hunched while standing upright. ‘You can get changed now. We’ll start again tomorrow morning.’ She stood up quickly, tugging at the dress as she moved towards the bathroom to get changed. Her sudden relief at finishing made her appear taller.
As he watched them go, part of him felt that by allowing her to leave he was giving up. He wanted to keep her there and try to extract the image he needed from her, but she was a child and he couldn’t place on her the expectations he had of himself. He told the assistant she could leave for the day too, then he stayed on in the studio alone, scrolling through the photos he’d taken, but he knew he had nothing he could use. There was always this sickness at the thought that he wouldn’t be able to make it work, when he had to entertain the possibility of abandoning his idea. It was a sort of floating, the feeling of returning slowly to earth from a great height, like a cinder caught in a current of cool air.
•
Outside the studio a blue light had fallen, shadows were starting to swallow the day. He walked down the lane and out onto Broadway, where the cars surged forward with the change of lights. The people walking past were young, university students, carrying books and wearing backpacks. He remembered that age and to him it didn’t even seem so long ago. He had sped away from that age too quickly, without really being aware of what he was moving away from. All his life, he had been racing and it was only now he wondered what place it was he had hoped to reach so quickly.
At that age, the future had seemed large, unknown and daunting, but now it was the past that billowed up behind him, rising like a cloud of dust.
16
They arrived the next day at ten. Phoebe walked into the studio, but Pippa stood on the doorstep. She called out, ‘My car wouldn’t start this morning. I need to take it to a mechanic to replace the battery. Would it be okay if I left Phoebe here with you? I’ll be back in an hour or two. Phoebe will be alright without me, won’t she?’ Her voice was high and uncertain, the in-between notes on a piano, the black keys towards the top of the scale that lingered after having been struck. She brushed a loose piece of hair from her forehead and, when she held her hands together in front of her, her fingers seemed to be shaking. Pippa looked towards his assistant for reassurance. ‘I wouldn’t normally leave her,’ she said, looking sideways at Phoebe, ‘but it’s sort of an emergency.’
‘Of course, she’ll be fine. It will be much the same as yesterday. There’s really no need for you to stay.’ In fact, he would prefer it if she left, though he couldn’t say so. Her absence would give him more control over the shoot.
Pippa bit her lip. ‘If you’re sure it’s okay . . . I’ll be back around lunchtime. Or maybe I should stay?’ She took a step forward and he worried she was about to change her mind.
‘She’ll be fine,’ he said.
Phoebe watched him from a distance, moving out from behind a table to a chair, always keeping something between them. She moved in front of the screen and sat down on the stool, even though he hadn’t fixed the camera to the tripod yet. It was a space she knew she could occupy. She saw the dress laid over the back of the chair and moved towards it, brushing her fingers carefully across the lace.
‘Yes, you can get changed into the dress again, if you like. We’ll be working on the same shot as yesterday.’
She nodded and slipped her feet from her shoes, reaching for the button on her jeans. That was when he realised she was about to get changed there, in front of him and his assistant, and it provoked a sadness in him that she was so trusting, although she didn’t know him at all. He was aware of how easily she could be taken advantage of.
‘You remember where the bathroom is?’ he said and pointed towards it.
When she came back he had the camera set up on its tripod. There was a sudden burst of light as his assistant checked the strobes and a splinter of sound moved through the room. He smiled at Phoebe and she moved her mouth awkwardly to one side. Hers was a smile that could never look completely happy; that would, because of her face, always suggest some inner grief.
He took her photograph, but she was looking below the lens rather than into it, her gaze lowered and shy.
‘Can I get you to look into the camera, Phoebe?’ He was tired. He wasn’t sure he was up to spending the day with her again; the thought of it exhausted him, as though the day ahead required strenuous physical activity. So often, photographing someone felt like asking them to agree to something being taken from them.
Sometimes he thought his occupation involved a sort of stealing; he stood in front of people and smiled the warm and charismatic smile of a thief and most of the time nobody noticed what they’d lost. Sometimes they didn’t even understand it later, when they saw the photograph hanging on a gallery wall. And he tiptoed away afterwards with his bag of money, dressed in black from head to toe.
He asked her to sit sideways and look back at the camera and, in the first shot he took, her mouth was open, her lips moist. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s great,’ but as soon as he said it, she looked down.
An hour later, he remembered the biscuits he’d left, still in shopping bags from when he’d bought them the day before, on the card table he’d set up against the wall.
‘Would you like a biscuit?’ he said.
‘What kind?’ she asked, seeming uncertain about whether or not she’d heard him correctly. She looked at him cautiously, standing and moving sideways rather than towards him.
He reached into the shopping bag. ‘I have fruit parcels.’ He held them up. Phoebe screwed her nose up at the packet. ‘And chocolate,’ he said, and her eyes turned bright. As he watched her eat the biscuits, some barrier inside her seemed to go down. She ate one and then another and he wondered if she would eat the whole packet. He took one, biting off each end and prising it apart.
‘You eat it like that?’ Phoebe asked, still suspicious.
He nodded, feeling the chocolate clot at the back of his throat. A vacuum of feeling had ballooned open between them, created by him trying to gain her trust and her being unsure of whether to hand it over. He tried to calmly navigate his way across that space.
His assistant joined them and ate a biscuit too. She dipped hers into a cup of tea she’d made for herself and Phoebe watched as she licked the melted chocolate away. Phoebe reached for a third biscuit, picked it up, turned it over and replaced it.
‘I think I’ll save that one for after lunch,’ she said.
‘You know, you can eat as many as you like. There’s a whole packet there that won’t get eaten otherwise,’ he said. It drew another vein of sadness from him; this restraint he saw in her that belonged to an adult. Somehow she had suppressed her child’s urge to live by impulse.
When he was back behind the camera, she was more open, somehow more pliable. He’d seen this happen before; he offered a person something sweet and it made them believe he could do no wrong to them. It was a trick, a technique he had learnt, but he was never proud of himself for using it.
‘Tilt your head a bit,’ he said, tilting his hand to show her what he meant, and she m
oved her head slowly until he held his hand still to indicate where she should stop.
From then on they worked without speaking, with gestures. After about twenty minutes of working that way, she looked at him with a sudden determination. It was as if in that moment, the ambivalence she had about him faded and she decided she would no longer withhold herself from him. She stared into the lens and a cold certainty ran through him. He didn’t take his hands off the camera. He took five photographs and he knew he had what he needed from her. He turned around to his assistant who gave him a single nod of approval.
•
He had the photographs developed and scanned the next day, and the day after that he started to work on them, choosing the photos he wanted to work with first. It was hard for him to discard so many images and he kept all the photos he had ever taken on his hard drive, even those he’d never used, although he rarely went back to look at them again. Choosing one image over another always left him with a sense of loss. It was a process that felt to him like losing possibilities, which was why it always took him such a long time to decide which image to use. He liked knowing that there were so many unperfected photos still in existence, standing like shadows behind the work that was eventually exhibited.
Mostly, the work he did after taking the photograph was a process of smoothing over, of removing all the imperfections and joins, his movements small and delicate, like a potter working with clay. This was his favourite part of his work, when his view of what he had created was at its most generous, when he saw its possibilities instead of only its flaws. He made the tones more consistent, the colours starker and the contrasts sharper, moving the mouse across his computer screen in small strokes and clicks, and a sharp pain shot through his shoulder from the tension in his arm.
Where the Light Falls Page 9