Portrait of Camille Oken

Fiction: Notes on a rejected magazine profile.

[Editor’s notes on first draft of Carter’s photographer profile 8/19/24 E.S.]

FLAGSTAFF, AZ - It takes me two days to adjust to the altitude. Altitude in Arizona, who would have thought? They told me this was the desert. Apparently there's such thing as high desert, not just on the Mongolian steppe but here in the United States. I stick to water and nurse my head and eventually work my way through it.

I'm here from New York to profile Camille Oken. She's not famous. Neither am I. In the scheme of cosmic time, she’s nobody, but her portraits have captured the photography world’s attention for a half-moment. So, my third-rate Brooklyn arts magazine saw fit to send me down for a culture piece.

[Carter, cut ‘third-rate,’ not appropriate language - E.S.]

Arrival. She picks me up from the Flagstaff Pulliam Airport. Normally I’d consider it a breach of journalistic propriety, but my forty-dollars-a-day per diem can't even cover an Uber pickup, so I gratefully accept.

[cut per diem whining]

It’s a dingy white Corolla waiting for me at the curb of the green-roofed regional airport. The inside is strewn with notes and flyers turned to napkins turned to garbage. Not exactly the car you’d expect an angel of light to drive. That's her Instagram, angel of light. Later on, I worry aloud that the handle might come off conceited. She tells me it’s an ideal to strive for.

I get in and there’s this plain young woman of humming along to the folk station. My suitcase takes the back seat, I take the front. “Camille,” she says, looking like a bit of a mess. She’s pushing thirty, jean jacket and bare-faced smile. We shake hands awkwardly over the gear shift. A traffic cop politely waves for us to move.

I spend the first half hour of our time together staring at her in profile. Fitting, I suppose. “Do you like this?” she asks, pointing to the radio. I haven't been listening at all.

She’s got a straight, balanced face. Not strong or weak. A jaw cut in clean degrees, a nose just right for her hazel eyes. The faintest traces of acne scars remind me she once had a childhood, just like the rest of us. As she talks, I wonder if a shy little boy like me would’ve ever befriended young Camille.

[is last sentence here necessary?]

As we turn onto my motel’s street, I try to bring up her work. “Are we starting now?” she asks me. I tell her we don't have to, not yet. “I want to shoot you first,” she says, and leaves it hanging in the air.

“I can't afford it,” I say honestly. Ever since she went viral last month, she’s been booked out for months at twelve-hundred dollars a session. For reasons unclear, she only does two a week.

[you didn’t ask why?]

“I won't charge,” she clarifies. “I’ll throw away the negatives, or I’ll keep them for myself. I need to know who you are before you profile me, and to know who you are I need to see you in my work.”

She drops me off, and I spend the following day holed up with an altitude headache. I’m camera-shy at the thought of the portrait, but I eventually accede. I don't know why I thought I could capture a portrait artist without her capturing me first.

[good]

She invites me out on the town the next day, Saturday. I walk to the neon tequila palace of she sent me on Maps. She’s an hour late, and when she arrives she’s with a group of locals of ambiguous relation. “I shot them,” she says as she introduces the Gabes and Bens and one Abigail. “They’re my old friends.”

We drink. The Cardinals come up every fifteen minutes or so. Apparently they didn't do so well at whatever they were trying to accomplish. She’s dressed down still. Drinking a Pilsner. You’d almost think she was one of the guys, until you notice the softness in her tone and wist in her eyes.

[rephrase. odd.]

At one point she puts her hand on mine to punctuate a joke. It stays for half the chorus of Sweet Caroline, which is not short. She does not look at me. She does not seem to observe anything deeply, beyond the unknowable images of her own mind’s eye.

How can such an unobserving woman be a photographer? It makes no sense, and yet it makes total sense. You stare at her and get the idea that she feels more than anyone in the room. What is she feeling? What is she feeling?

[cut repetition you are not gertrude stein]

At some point I learn the guys are real artists. Musicians who daylight as line cooks. Salt of the earth. Antipolar to a Brooklyn dipshit in a fast fashion blazer like me. I ask myself what I’m doing here, what I could possibly contribute. Happy hour ends. Someone buys another round. The finer points of Rage Against the Machine and Sonic Youth are covered in great detail. I remember little. I stare at her with my fist on my cheek, rock salt sticking to my sleeve.

They close and I stumble into the late summer dusk. In a haze, I find myself back in her dirty passenger's seat. She's there beside me, laughing in the parked car, leaning on the steering wheel in messy delirium. A nudge of the horn. She startles us both. I tell her she's in no state to drive ten blocks, and she accepts this as journalistic fact.

[is this what we are paying you for?]

We lie on our sides on tilted-back Corolla seats, staring at each other's pensive faces. Dueling to out-observe the other. Wordless. Trying not to break into fits of laughter. I have no sense of the hour.

“I’m afraid of change,” she says from silence.

“I think that's normal,” I murmur.

“No, but, I’m afraid of staying the same, too. I’m afraid of getting old, of getting left behind, of forgetting. I’m most afraid of forgetting.”

“Forgetting what?”

“This,” she says. “How it feels now. This and everything.”

Is that why she captures people in portrait? To stop time? I can almost complete the thought.

She plays me two Frankie Cosmos albums. I lie on my back and stare at the places where the gray upholstery is pulling away from the chassis. Some time later the glow fades back to sobriety. She drives me to my motel door. She leaves.

Sunday I meet her at her studio, a white industrial outcropping nestled near huge red rocks. It's clean and bright. The air is thin, full of dust and sun shafts. I get out of my Uber and she shows me the lobby, which she’s hastily converted to a showroom. A dozen printed studio portraits hang on the walls.

Each one is like a confession, a diary. Some are shot from across the room, putting men and women small in frame. They gaze down or off to the side. Occasionally their eyes pierce straight through the lens. Others are intimately close, with details of brows or nose ridges and lips that fill the composition. The expressions seem to tell you more than a biography ever could.

She explains her four-color printing process to me. Black, cyan, yellow, and magenta are each separately, imperfectly applied to the canvas from the photo negative. The technique gives the feeling of a waking dream. “How do you choose how to stage them?” I ask.

“It comes to me, in the act,” Camille tells me. She’s examining the prints all the while, as if it's her first time seeing them. “You don't have anywhere to be, right?”

“Why?” I ask. “How long will this take?”

“It takes as long as it takes,” she says. She's unlocking the door to the studio now. “The quickest has been maybe seventeen minutes. The longest was a day and a half.”

“A day and a half,” I say, sure that I'm not understanding her. “You mean you kept a subject in here for thirty-six hours?”

“More or less,” she says. “With breaks. You can't rush these things.”

[condense above to summary. too novelistic.]

She gets me to the space and it’s cold and suddenly I’m observed. In the omniscient eye of the lens, there I am. Straight hair, lanky, clean-shaven, anxious. Every expression of my English, my Welsh, my Hungarian roots combines under the spotlight into a young man who hates the center of attention.

She adjusts two lights and two large cloths on stands. We don't talk. She brings me a stool and I sit, staring at the camera, staring at her. Are she and the camera the same? They seem to merge as the hour passes, becoming a higher creation born from mortal woman and immortal glass. I ask her if I can stand, and she just nods. More color seems to appear from heaven as she adjusts the skylights.

Can't I go back to being the observer? The pen? I'm no model. Every thought that comes to me goes straight to my face, straight to the lens. She hasn't taken a single photograph. Is this some kind of test? Am I failing it?

She turns on a stereo I hadn't noticed. “What music is this?” I ask. She tells me it's her music. The tones are warm and analog, difficult to place. There's a crackle beneath the instrumental hum.

At some point, I realize I can talk to her, that it's not against the rules and she's basically done with her setup. So, we talk. We talk about fear. We talk about purpose. We talk about art. I learn about her parents and their plan to cross the continent in an RV. I learn about the time she threw a cast iron pan through a window during a fight. I learn about a website she used to run anonymously in 2010, collecting artwork and clippings and film prints into one grand collage of teenage ennui. She still has the files, she tells me, though the site’s not online anymore. She can't bear to let it truly go.

In the third hour, something breaks in me and I start sharing too. Suddenly I'm not observed, not collapsing like a quantum field under analysis. I'm just seen, seen as I'm supposed to be. I tell her about the seventeen years I spent thinking I was destined for solitude. I tell her about graduate school and the worry that I'm wasting my time. It all just flows, and she nods, and from minute into minute she starts to understand before I even finish my thought. It's like I bring up some moment from the past and she's already lived it. Like she's lived my life as well as hers.

[cut down the above. piece is not about you.]

Then I lose all sense of time. I only know that the sun is sinking. I've heard these notes on the stereo three times before. I don't know how long the recording is. I don't know if we're close or far from our destination now. Somewhere along the way we start making plans. I tell her about a bakery that I think she'd like in Queens. She tries to describe what it's like to stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon and gaze out. Words, she tells me, just can't capture it. Can words capture anything? They can't capture her. This text here is an afterimage—a shadow cast by her presence. It only hints at the emotional form in the vaguest sense, flat and unconvincing. What am I hoping to achieve in these words? To share her? I can't possibly share her with anyone. I can't even share her with myself.

[what??]

Eternity of mind. I lose not just my sense of time, but eventually time itself. I'm living in all times. I'm living in each of the stories I told her, and each one she told me. I'm living her childhood. I'm living our future. I'm living the moment that I leave and she drives me back to the Motel 6 on the west side of downtown Flagstaff. I'm living the moment I write my last words. I'm living my death. I'm living my wedding. The birth of my children. The million happy moments in between.

Those moments are with her. I feel in that instant like I've never actually lived before, never been present on the earth until just now. The beginning and middle and end of romance are all together in my head. I choke up, and I look at her, and she's close to silent tears as well. Then I'm crying, and I turn my head away and there's a single camera click.

She’s captured me. One photograph, and the lens cap goes on. In three days I’ll be another print on her wall, or left to fade in her studio drawer. “That's it,” she says, composing herself. “That’ll turn out well. You can profile me now.”

I can't. I can’t even look at her. I call a ride and rush back to my hotel and pour everything out in a .docx in a blur. Portrait of Camille Oken. A woman I’ve known for two days. Does she do this to everyone? She seems larger than life, like Athena come down from Olympus. She’s just a girl with a Nikon film camera. How is this happening to me?

I call her. Actually, I called her just now, and she answered. I asked her if she’d let us give it a shot, dating, if I stayed in Flagstaff, if I gave up my job and had my roommate ship me my stuff. She laughed, and I told her I was serious. Then she got serious, too.

[is this a joke? ridiculously unprofessional.]

I’m giving up my position at the magazine. Effective immediately. I’m available remotely to help find a replacement if needed. It's possible I'll give up writing altogether. We’ll have to see how things go. I'm meeting her Tuesday at a coffee shop called Sweet Remembrance. Wish me luck. I think this is the start of me finding out where I'm supposed to be.

[Note from EIC to FD: Rerun the Lucy Dacus piece from Q1 in this section tmrw. 86 this and take Carter off the Gusto payroll. what a waste of time.]

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