'I've heard that before. Lots of girls here say things like that.'
'I'm not 'lots of girls.' I'm Kimberly.'
'Yeah, Kimberly. She nodded, 'And that makes you special.' She nodded vehemently.
'I'll say this for you-you're persistent enough.'
'Pays off sometimes. Like here we are.'
'Yeah,' I said.
'Getting tired? Want to quit?'
'You kidding?'
'We've just started, you know.'
'So let's cut the talk and get back to work,' she said.
Oh, she was hard-ass! Going to show me how tough she was. That she could take whatever I wanted to fling at her. That I could whap! whap! whap! her a thousand times, and still she'd come back for more.
And there was something else too, this notion she had that somewhere along the line she'd commissioned me to take her portrait: that though I could strip her, order her around, I did all that with her consent; that in the end I worked for her because she was the one who was going to pay the fee.
That wasn't the way I looked at it, but it was something to work with-this battle of our wills. We'd gotten through the first level of hostility were approaching something deeper now. I wasn't quite sure what it was, but felt I could make it work.
When we got back to the studio and she started to take off her clothes, I told her to stay dressed. Then I perched her on a high stool in the middle of the room, lit her carefully, and went to work with the 8 x 10.
That's a slow examining camera, a camera with a presence. It says to the sitter: 'I'm as big as you and I've got this big eye and I can see deep inside your brain. So don't try to fool me because you can't. And maybe, if you show me who you are, I may decide to treat you nice.
I was working seriously now, looking closely at her, looking to see who she really was. And I saw a lot more than I expected, vulnerability of a special sort. Perhaps some injury suffered in the past had hardened the surface of her, giving her the strength to take the treatment I'd been dishing out, But there was a place, I sensed, somewhere deep inside, that was soft and easily hurt. That was the place I wanted to reach.
There's a lot of misunderstanding about serious portrait photography-people think photographers want to strip their subjects bare. Some do, but for me it's not so simple. I'm interested in showing the tension in my subject, the war between the face he shows the world and the hidden face within.
It's that tension, crystallized in a kind of reflective aggression, that can give a portrait real depth. The hyped-up magazine portraits, the ones of the rock stars staring meekly from the welter of rumpled sheets, or the comedians looking sad beside the urinals-for me they're attitudes, much too easy, much too glib. I feel the same about the so-called cruel portraits of Avedon, portraits that say, No matter how high this person's status, inside my studio there'll be no flattery.
That's a message that tells me a lot about Avedon, but very little about his sitters.
That afternoon, as I began to take my first serious pictures of Kimberly, I gave up the last remnants of my disdain. I was interested in her now, interested in the problem she presented. This, I thought to myself, is a girl who has a secret.
I got caught up as I exposed frame after frame of sheet film, working slowly, trying, with each exposure, to edge closer to that tender place inside. I forgot about time. It was after nine when I finally stopped.
She looked at me curiously when I told her we were finished for the day.
'We're not done?' she asked.
'Just with the first session. We've still got a ways to go.'
She stretched.
'How many sessions are there going to be?'
'As many as it takes. Come back same time tomorrow afternoon. Be prepared to work till eleven or twelve.'
She kissed me briskly on the cheek, then headed for the door. When she reached it, she turned.
'I learned something today.'
'What was that?' I asked.
'Two things actually. First, don't ever dress up for Geoffrey Barnett.
Second, beneath the nasty exterior the guy's a pussycat.'
She gave me her handsome smile, then disappeared.
Later that night, still excited about what had happened, I phoned my closest friends to tell them the news. Frank Cordero and his Vietnamese wife, Mai, lived in Galisteo, New Mexico. He was ex-Special Forces, now a photographer. She was a sculptor. I was in love with her once.
'Well, it finally happened!' I told Frank.
'You took a portrait?'
'What else?'
'Oh, Geof-that's terrific!' He put on Mai to congratulate me too, then came on again.
'It was a 'she,' wasn't it?'
'It was a 'she,' all right.' I told him about Kimberly, as much as I knew, and how she had even admired the print of his I have hanging on my wall.
'Thing is,' I said, 'I don't know how well I did. Or whether I can do it again. I want to keep working with her as long as I can, see how far I can take it. Then, if the results are good, I'll try with someone else.'
'Stick with her, Geof,' Frank advised.
'Don't give that girl up. She may have changed your life.'
My sessions with Kim continued. The city got caught up in a heat wave, the humidity was terrible, the air turned stagnant and suffocating. But no matter the physical discomfort, she always showed up on time.
When we worked outside, I'd usually pick the location. But when she'd suggest a place, I was happy to go along. Mostly we worked in my studio, and then usually with the view camera. The pace slowed down, sometimes to one or two exposures an hour.
When we'd finish I'd let her use my shower before I sent her home. Then, after she'd leave, I'd feel a certain emptiness around the loft.
There was an ideal portrait I was working toward. Though I couldn't visualize it yet, I felt that eventually it would come. Kim was a challenging subject. I was determined to shoot until I got her right.
And she was there for me, helpful, obedient, patient when I stood before her, sometimes afraid.
I tried hard not to reveal my fear to her, and if she sensed it, she kept her feelings to herself. I wasn't sure if she understood what we were doing, how important her presence was. But then the best nurse is always the one who refuses to acknowledge that you're sick.
I was working toward a major breakthrough, my return to the human face;
I wanted to produce a picture that would be better and deeper than any portrait I'd made before. It was madness, of course. I'd never spent much time or film on a single subject. But on the third day, when I realized I was not at all eager for the sessions to end, I felt fortunate to have found a sitter so receptive, and apparently oblivious of time.
Not that she didn't rebel. She did. Her first attempt came near midnight, toward the end of our third session. She'd been glaring at me angrily for half an hour, while I sat watching her, refusing to shoot.
'Grimace as long as you like,' I said.
'I'm patient. I can wait you out.'
'Fuck this shit! I'm going home!' She hopped off her stool, looked up at the ceiling, opened her mouth and screamed.
'Oh, that's nice,' I said.
'Do that again.' She cursed me. 'Like I said,' I told her, 'you can go home anytime.'
'It's so enraging when you say that! If I quit now, it's over, right?'
'If you walk out before I dismiss you, it's definitely all over,' I confirmed. :'Do I get my glossies?' 'You get them when I give them to you. I only give them to you when I'm done.'
She stamped her foot, returned to her stool, glared at me, then relaxed, grimaced, grinned, shook her head furiously, moaned and slumped. When she glanced up to see how I was taking her little tantrum, I caught a glimpse
