By: Viktoria Faust
Sometimes, you must give all of yourself to accomplish greatness; and sometimes, it really takes all of you.
She appeared one evening at the door to my studio, just as I was getting ready to close up. I was alone. My assistant in the photo lab had left hours ago. In times like these, when I was by myself, I could completely give myself over to what I loved doing, knowing I wouldn’t be bothered by customers wanting to hire me to take photos at their wedding. Those were the jobs that put food on the table, but they weren’t the reason I decided to pursue photography when I was still just a boy.
My father was a photographer. Like me, he made a living running his own studio. But for my father it was just a job, a means to support his family. He did not derive the same satisfaction I did from my work, nor did he grasp the depth of his profession. He was content to be a family man. I suppose he was happy, unlike me.
I always asked for more, wanted more, and was never satisfied with what I had. I always felt like something was missing from my life, like I could have more and better only if I had… The inability to finish this sentence was the core of my frustration. I didn’t actually know what it was that I wanted, or how to get it. Each of my successes meant little to me because I didn’t know where my life was going. I felt like I was standing in place, waiting for something to happen, for something to move, for the cards to fall…
I grew tired of waiting. By then I came to understand that nothing would ever change, that the world would never be as brightly colored as in my aspirations. A gray dusk descended onto my life with every passing year.
I was thirty-six, having squandered my youth without ever having tasted life. Put another way, whatever parts of life I had tasted were bland and colorless. But, in this barren wasteland that was my late thirties life, there was one thing that hadn’t changed even from my childhood days, the one thing that not even the banality of my work could kill—my love for photography.
Photography was, for me, my soul mate, something that my father might have secretly admired, but could never understand. I didn’t dare call my calling artistic. It sounded too prosaic. I kept my art from the world; shyly, or maybe jealously, if truth be told. I will probably never know if I could have made it as a mainstream photographer, but I didn’t care about that. What I photographed was for me alone. For my eyes only. I never showed anyone all the photos I kept in boxes marked simply with the dates and years on their lids.
The photographs inside were jumbled together, like thoughts in the head of a confused philosopher. I take them out to look at them on occasion, but not as often as before. There were always new photos to take, moments to capture, opportunities to seize; and never time enough to waste on old photos.
My mother died of tuberculosis when I was seven. People still died from tuberculosis then. Now it seemed that people died only of “real” illnesses—cancer, leukemia, AIDS, and some exotic flu strains. When my father died, I inherited his studio and the apartment above it. I kept the boxes in the apartment. They took up half of an entire room.
Some people photographed animals, and others, sunsets. I didn’t have a favorite subject. I took photographs on instinct, which demanded that I always have my camera with me. Looking back through my prior work, there were more photos taken at dusk than any other time of day.
I think the reasons for this were practical. I closed up shop at dusk. It was the time when I could be myself, when my efforts weren’t claimed by strangers. Dusk meant freedom, my time. It was probably why she, too, came at dusk.
I was in the back room when I heard the chimes at the front door. I glanced at my watch. It was five minutes to closing time. I should have locked up earlier.
There was silence. Nobody shouted, “Good evening,” or coughed and asked, “Anyone here?” the way people usually do when they are alone in an empty shop. At first I thought somebody had come in from the street and looked in, and then left upon finding no one inside. But no, she was there, quiet as a shadow, waiting for me. I gathered my tools into a bag, and with my camera slung across my shoulder, I walked into the studio to see her.
She wore a brown trench coat that had faded to beige a long time ago. It was much too big for her. Fine brown hair hung limply over her ears, shoulder length, cut unevenly, like whoever styled it knew nothing about hairdressing. It was also wet or greasy—I could not tell which—but in either case, her hair looked starved for nourishment.
Her face was small, cheekbones pronounced, eyes bulgy and haggard, as though even the slightest thing in the world scared her. She reminded me of a cleaning lady I had hired once to tidy up the studio each week: shy, slightly slouching, and unbelievably introverted.
“We’re closing,” I said without preamble. The nerve of this stranger to intrude upon my free time. Customers, it seemed to me, were incapable of reading door signs, especially the signs that showed the time you closed for the day.
“All I need is a photo for my ID,” she said. Her voice was a muffled bird warble that would have been nearly unintelligible if I weren’t paying attention. “The sign in your door says you do rush jobs,” she went on, as if to tell me how to run my business.
“Yes, during business hours, but they’re long over,” I said, wanting to get rid of her as soon as I could.
“It would only take two minutes,” she insisted.
At that moment I became aware of how distraught she seemed. It showed in her eyes. I shivered, suddenly overcome with inexplicable fear. I wasn’t worried about myself; I was worried for her. Maybe the request for an ID photo was a pretext, maybe she was trying to hide from someone by ducking into my studio.
I relented. Besides, it wasn’t much trouble to take an ID photo. All it took was for me to turn on the lights, make a few practice shots with the digital camera, and let her pick the one she liked best. I’d lose several minutes of dusk, but I still had the rest of the night to snap photos.
“You really shouldn’t come five minutes before closing time,” I said as I placed my bag and camera on the counter. I tried to sound reproachful, but failed at that. I just don’t have the voice for it.
“It won’t happen again,” she said just above a whisper. I wasn’t sure whether I had actually heard or just imagined her say that.
“The photos will be ready tomorrow afternoon,” I said as I readied my equipment.
She said nothing, and I didn’t push.
Once we were done taking photos, she picked out the one she wanted and paid for it.
That was the last time I saw her in my studio.
* * *
Autumn gave way to winter, and then came spring in its youthful, reckless way. I changed jobs and moved to a new city hundreds of kilometers from where I had spent much of my life. That was when I saw the face I would remember until my dying day. It was a photograph of a vibrant girl with a movie star smile. She looked in touch with her femininity and wasn’t afraid to flaunt it. Hers was a face you knew you’d seen somewhere before but you couldn’t place it; the kind of face you saw in the windows of big city glamour studios.
A vague doubt crossed my mind. It was subconscious, something I could have ignored. But the real, concrete feeling of eeriness, of something not right, only came when my internal voice found a path to my vocal chords.
“Who is she?” I asked Emilian.
Emilian was a friend from college. He owned Candid Studios. I worked for him for some time—when times are tough, you do what you must to survive. Times were indeed tough, but everything had worked out in my favor. Shortly after I closed my shop, one of Emilian’s photographers quit suddenly. He hired me to replace his former employee.
Emilian looked in my direction. “Riana?” he asked.
There were photos of at least twenty different girls in the window, but he knew right away who I was talking about. I nodded in response, repeating her name silently, mystified.
Riana.
“She came here one evening,” Emilian explained, letting his eyes wander off into the distance. His hard features softened, taking on a dreamy look. “She needed a few photos for her modeling book,” he continued. Then he looked down and away, as though realizing he’d said too much.
At that moment I came to learn two things that distressed me greatly. First, I would never have thought Riana was a model, at least not by her photograph. Forgive me if I sound crass, but ever since I started working at Candid, I have met enough models to categorically label them shallow. Not airheaded, I mean really empty, in every sense of the word: emotionally, spiritually, physically, and mentally. Starved and anorexic to the point where they seemed as though something inside of them had stopped working, and they had lost the ability to draw nourishment.
Riana wasn’t like that. She was buzzing with energy, beauty, and that unspoiled childish part of herself that few people retain through the teenage years. Judging by her photo, she was in her late teens, approaching twenty years old.
The second of the things that upset me was a memory. At just that moment, I thought of the woman who visited my studio near closing time months ago, the one who asked me for an ID photo. I hadn’t made the connection until now. The Riana I remembered was a shadow of Emilian’s. Hardly anyone would recognize her as the same person in both photos.
“She never came back for the photos, I presume,” I said, surprised at how bitter my voice sounded.
Emilian looked at me over his shoulder. “No, not at all,” he said. “She came. We had several nice photo sessions.”
“But…” I cut into his pause.
His eyes drifted off as though he were watching some film from the past, one he didn’t dare watch until now.
“There was something strange in Riana,” he said.
You don’t say, I wanted to shout, at the same time fighting an urge to look at the photo in the window again. Instead I kept quiet, calm, fearing that I would never get him to tell the story if I interrupted him now.
“She was maybe eighteen when I met her,” he said quietly. “Very talented child, I saw that right away. The camera loved her, and she loved it too. She was tireless. She did anything she could for a good shot. She could pose all night and attend three fashion shows the next day.” He trailed off. “Oh, she could have been one of the best.”
“But…” I whispered, but he didn’t hear me. He resumed speaking when the current of memory started to overflow again.
“After a while I realized her unquenchable desire to work didn’t arise from a wish to make something of herself. At first I thought she was on drugs. That wasn’t true at all. The only drug that drove her was herself, like something was eating at her from the inside, just like how some people vampirically suck the life out of other people.” He paused to stare me in the face. “Riana consumed herself.”
He looked away. “When she came, she was only a pretty girl. Flat stomach, defiant small breasts, and perky little ass planted on the longest legs you could imagine. She was a fluttering girl, not formed enough to be called a woman. But in the photos she would transform into something completely different. A woman above all women. The essence of allure. A goddess. Oh, she could be anything you could imagine. And that’s what she was. With every new photo, she was more and more.”
I wanted to say, “But” again, but I collected myself, bit my tongue.
“You should have seen her.” Something dark and gloomy descended onto Emilian’s brow, something like rain clouds before a storm.
“She started fading in plain sight,” he murmured. “She didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, the only thing she lived for was the camera lens. And the photos were getting better and better—full of spirit, that natural grandeur that no makeup or clothes can give to a model. Great as the photos looked, in person she looked emptier, exhausted.”
He sighed. “Eventually, she couldn’t do fashion shows anymore, because with her looks she couldn’t get past the casting phase. She took it poorly, but tried not to show it.”
Emilian hung his head. “I am probably the last photographer she worked with. One day she came to me and said, ‘I’m dying.’ I told her that was crazy, and that I didn’t want to hear her saying things like that. And yet, I somehow knew her illness wasn’t something a doctor could diagnose.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“If it had been a bloodsucker that attacked her, a doctor might have given her a transfusion to save her life. But it was she who drained her—who drank her own blood, who sucked her own bones and devoured her own flesh.”
He knitted his fingers. “No one could protect her from herself. I remember her telling me, ‘I have nothing to give.’ And I said to her, ‘Nonsense! Don’t talk like that.’ All the while I kept snapping away, knowing each photo would be better than the previous.”
“And then?” I asked when the silence went on too long.
Emilian turned his back on me again, absentmindedly arranging slides on the table. “And then, one day she just disappeared. She looked terrible then, like she had a fatal illness. It’s awful, but I hated her for that, for some time. I had become addicted to her photos, just like she was addicted to being photographed. It was a while before I realized she was just trying to buy some more time before she completely disappeared.”
I didn’t ask him if he kept her photos. I knew he did, and that he probably had thousands of them. He might never look at them again, just like the photos I kept in boxes piled up in that corner of my apartment.
I also knew that I could, if I wanted to, find all those magazines Riana worked for, all those photos of her smiling from the glossy pages.
For the first time, I realized what Riana came for when she visited my studio in that gray dusk. Just an ID photo. Just a little fix for a junkie who knows each new hit could be the last. With fear, with mortal dread, but…
* * *
Some time after that talk with Emilian, I searched my home, looking for Riana’s photo. I had always made it a point to backup all my digital photos to CD. Other photographers might not do that, but I do.
My thoughts put me in unease. Worse, these unsettling thoughts came with greater frequency than ever. Maybe I only lived to take Riana’s photograph. Maybe this all was a dream.
My musing cut short when I found what I was looking for.
You know how badly people turn out in ID photos? Well, Riana’s photograph was flawless. She looked surreal, like some beautiful mythical creature that was never meant to be caught on film.
I’ve recently begun looking for a new picture of her. I know she won’t be in the fashion magazines, as she is too far gone for those. Besides, in her state, I don’t think she could live through a photo session. Instead, I look for her in the local newspapers. Perhaps a chance photo might catch her at a book stand, or at the market, or even at a crosswalk, waiting for the light to change. I’m doubtful, though.
More and more these days I look for her photograph in the obituaries. I don’t doubt I will see her soon, and that she will be the most beautiful corpse ever.