As he lay in bed the next morning, he heard the phone ring and he thought for a moment about leaving it, letting it ring out and transfer through to voicemail. In the mornings after he woke, it always took him some time to warm to the world. But not many people had his telephone number here and it could be Dom calling. He threw off the covers and rummaged through his bag for his phone.
‘Hello?’
‘Hi, my name is Pippa Davis. I, um, looked you up?’
He didn’t immediately recognise the voice.
‘Pardon?’ He looked back at his bed longingly. The sheets looked soft and inviting.
‘You wanted to photograph my daughter? We met outside her school last Friday?’
‘Oh, yes. I remember now. Sorry.’ The memory of the girl with the lopsided face returned to him. The thought of her produced a shudder of recognition, that he often had when he identified the future subjects of his work.
‘I looked up your website. Your photographs are—’ she hesitated ‘—beautiful.’
‘Beautiful?’ he said. There was something about him, some small fault in the way he was wired, that made him more comfortable with criticism than with praise. No matter how much experience he’d had, how detached and professional he could make himself sound, his photographs always made him feel awkward. Seeing his own work was like looking at his reflection—all he saw were the faults, the things he thought could be better.
‘Maybe truthful is a better word,’ she said after a pause, and he felt more comfortable with that appraisal. ‘I’m still not entirely comfortable, though. I just worry about Phoebe and the way she looks. Sometimes I think she doesn’t understand how different she is to other people. I’m not sure photographing her is such a good idea.’ She sighed. ‘But Phoebe wants to do it. She’s at that age, I guess. She’s curious about her own looks.’
‘I’ve photographed many children her age. I try to involve them as much as possible in the process. Most of my models enjoy being involved.’ Listening to himself speak, he sounded like a salesman reeling off a pitch.
‘But Phoebe is different to most children,’ she said. ‘Because of her face.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Is that why you want to photograph her, because of her face?’
‘Well, yes, I guess it is.’ He wasn’t used to being asked questions so directly. ‘But it’s not the only reason.’
‘What do you mean?’ Pippa asked cautiously.
‘I mean, it is her face. I don’t know how to explain it.’ He thought for a moment, wondering how to express his meaning. ‘Her face lets you see inside her.’
‘Oh, I see.’ She was silent for a moment and he thought he might have offended her. He felt relieved when she spoke again. ‘Well, what is it you had in mind?’ she asked.
‘I probably need her in the studio for a day or two. I usually rent a studio space in Chippendale.’ He wondered if the same studio would still be available.
‘I mean, what do you intend for the photos of Phoebe? We’ve never been involved in anything like this before.’
It always sounded strange, whenever he tried to explain his work to other people, and it rarely made any sense to him until it was finished. He thought of the girl’s face, tugged at on one side, how he’d seen her in the playground in the late afternoon light and immediately knew he wanted to take her photograph without really understanding why. He could already tell, just from watching her in those moments, that she was too self-aware to be photogenic; she seemed almost to wince at the world. The way she held on to the broken hat carefully but firmly, not as though it was something damaged, but as though it was something that still needed to be taken care of.
‘It would be a fairly simple photograph,’ he said. ‘The important part will be getting the details of the shot right, the lighting and so forth.’
‘Oh,’ she said, sounding unsure what to make of his answer. ‘Well, if you do photograph her, I would want to be there. I mean, I feel I would need to be present. Photographs like yours—they take people and preserve them and that is something my daughter will have to live with for the rest of her life.’
Nobody had ever said anything like that to him before. Sometimes people said no, but usually the idea of being photographed for art was too alluring to resist. The idea of being captured on film was seductive; people usually associated photography with beauty.
‘Well, I can let you see the images before they’re exhibited and you can certainly be there while I’m taking them.’ He heard the sound of a bus outside, easing away from the stop, the breath of its brakes.
‘What if Phoebe and I don’t like the photos? Will you exhibit them even if we aren’t happy with them?’
He had never given another person control over his own work and he reacted badly to suggestions from galleries, turning his back on their comments. It was his work, he always felt, and if it succeeded or failed, it ought to be on the basis of his own choices. But it was also Phoebe’s face and she was a child. ‘Well, if there’s something you seriously object to, I’ll definitely consider your opinion, but usually I ask people to sign a consent form before I take the photograph.’
‘No, I think I would want to have the right to say “no”, especially if Phoebe changes her mind,’ she said firmly.
This was getting more complicated than he’d intended. He knew it would probably be best not to proceed, to wait until he was back in Berlin and find another subject to photograph there. But instead he heard himself saying, ‘Well, okay. If Phoebe is unhappy with the image, I will agree not to exhibit it.’ The shoot wouldn’t be too expensive, he reasoned, and it would be worth taking the risk, as long as he could get it done quickly. He had a feeling about Phoebe; this could be the photograph he’d been searching for, the one that would make the impact he needed.
‘Okay, that sounds reasonable. When were you thinking?’
‘Are you available in the next few days?’ He still hoped he could take the photographs and fly back to Berlin without changing his flights, but the timing would be tight.
‘I’m working tomorrow and the next day; I work at the library in Leichhardt. And the weekend might be difficult anyway, but what about Monday and Tuesday next week. Could we do it then?’
On Saturday he was due to fly back to Berlin. To take this girl’s photograph, he would have to delay his return flight. He bit his cheek and thought of Dom. He wasn’t sure how he would explain this to her without upsetting her more than he already had.
‘All right,’ he said, after a pause. ‘Yes, I’ll check if I can hire a studio then.’
When he hung up, he stared at his phone. He thought of the photograph he was most recognised for, the photo that Pippa would have seen when she searched his name online. It seemed a sort of magic to him now, after years of trying to get his work exhibited, how quickly it had happened.
He was out to dinner with friends one night when one of them mentioned a man he had been to school with who had never lost his set of baby teeth. He knew immediately that he wanted to photograph him.
Andrew rented a warehouse in Redfern for the day, the cheapest studio he could find; the space had once been a mechanic’s garage and there were still oil stains on the dusty cement floor and a smell of metal. When the man walked into his studio that day, he seemed stern, with a hard face, his handshake brief and his palm rough. He was a large man, and he stood with his feet apart, as though to distribute his weight evenly. Later, when the man laughed, his laugh was loud. It boiled through his body and filled the room. It was difficult to reconcile the sudden rush of happiness contained in that laugh with the sombre man who had first greeted him. Andrew understood then that he was a man who, because of his appearance, treated the world with a certain suspicion, but underneath was otherwise happy.
It was a summer day and in the heat inside the warehouse, he felt himself slowly baking. The fan did nothing but stir up hot and stale air. They’d been in the studio for five hours and he was sweating, his clothes touching his body like clammy hands.
He opened a window to let the air in and when he was back in front of the camera, the man yawned and he had glimpsed something, maybe it was a brief glimpse into his own future, and he took the photo. He pressed the camera shutter down so hard his finger hurt afterwards. Inside the man’s mouth was pink and damp and it took up almost the whole frame of the shot, so that Andrew might have been looking into the mouth of a lion. At the corner of one eye was a tear, a small, perfect droplet; in the photo it almost looked like a small diamond. When it was exhibited later, he called the photo Teething and with that image his life was changed.
Afterwards, he found a gallery in Sydney to represent him. Until then, he’d mostly had only group shows and his chief success had been a shortlisting for a photography award many years before. He’d had one solo show at a co-op gallery in Surry Hills where he hadn’t even sold enough prints to recoup his own costs. But after Teething he was no longer dependent for his income on taking pictures of things he didn’t want to photograph, like furniture, food and underfed women in expensive clothes. The realm of commercial photography was behind him, its smallness and falseness no longer concerned him.
The next year the photograph had been exhibited as part of a group show in the Centre Pompidou in Paris and afterwards his photographs had been acquired by museums all over the world. And even though he still suffered setbacks and his existence was never extravagant, he could work quietly by himself from then on, pursuing only the things that mattered to him, working with ideas and subjects that he felt brought him some truth.
More recently, he wondered if his career would forever be defined by that single moment in time. Nothing he had created since had quite lived up to it—at least, not in his own mind. No other work he created had ever felt as clean. Sometimes, he felt he existed in the shadow of that photograph. No other picture had ever come to him so easily.