Chapter 174: Pictures
Then she looked at him directly.
Then back at the monitor.
Something in her expression had the quality of someone who had built something and was now seeing exactly what it did when it existed in the right conditions.
Marc positioned Sean near the south wall where the morning light was landing correctly and said something in French that his assistant translated for Sean as approximately, stand naturally, don’t try to do anything, just be where you are.
Sean stood where he was.
Marc fired three test shots and looked at the back of his camera and then looked at Vanessa and said something.
Vanessa translated from behind the monitor without taking her eyes off the screen. "He says he can see why I made that specific suit for that specific person."
"What does he mean," said Sean.
"He means," said Vanessa, "that the suit and the person are in conversation with each other the way good design is in conversation with the right wearer. That neither of them is performing anything. That they simply exist together correctly."
She looked up from the monitor at him.
"He’s right," she said.
Marc said something else, more direction this time, moving Sean’s position slightly, adjusting the angle of his shoulder by a fraction, and then stepping back and looking through the lens and then at the monitor and then saying something to his assistant that the assistant conveyed to Sean as, turn your head forty-five degrees to your left and look at the wall like you’re deciding something about it.
Sean looked at the wall like he was deciding something about it.
Which was easy because he was actually thinking about a woman who had spent eight months making something and was now standing behind a monitor watching it exist in the world it had been made for.
Marc fired a sequence of shots.
He looked at the screen and then at Vanessa and said something that he didn’t ask to be translated, which told Sean the something was between Marc and Vanessa specifically.
Vanessa looked at the monitor for a long moment.
She said something back to Marc, quietly.
Marc made a sound of agreement and turned back to his equipment.
"What did he say," said Sean.
"He said," Vanessa paused, "that this is the first campaign image I should use. That it already has everything the campaign needs in the first ten frames and that the rest of the shoot will give options but this is the one."
"What did you say back," said Sean.
Vanessa looked at the monitor. "I said I know."
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They worked for two hours.
Marc moved Sean through the courtyard with the specific unhurried efficiency of someone who understood that the best images came from allowing the subject to exist rather than constructing them. Different positions. Different light. Several changes within the collection, other pieces that Vanessa had brought specifically for the campaign, each one a different conversation between the garment and the person wearing it.
Sean found, somewhere in the first twenty minutes, that standing in front of a camera was considerably less strange than he’d expected. Not because he performed anything. Precisely because he didn’t. Marc kept saying variations of the same thing through his assistant, don’t do anything, just be where you are, and Sean found that being where he was came naturally in a way that the assistant told him quietly was not the case for most people in front of a lens for the first time.
"Most people try," the assistant said, during a change between pieces. "You don’t try. It’s very unusual."
"I don’t know what trying would look like," said Sean.
The assistant looked at him. "Exactly," he said, and went back to his equipment.
Between setups Sean looked at Vanessa behind the monitor.
She was focused in the specific way she was focused when something was going exactly as she’d imagined it and she was managing the specific tension between wanting to stay with that and needing to direct it to make sure it kept going that way.
At one point Marc brought her to stand beside him looking at the monitor at a specific frame. She looked at it for a moment and then looked at Sean in the courtyard and then at the monitor again.
She said something to Marc.
Marc nodded and made an adjustment to the lighting angle by speaking to his assistant, who repositioned one of the portable lights.
The next frame was different. Sean could see the difference in how Marc looked at the camera after he fired it, the specific satisfaction of someone who had just gotten the thing they were after.
Vanessa stayed looking at the monitor.
Sean watched her face from the courtyard.
She was looking at something on the screen with the expression she had in the store when she stood back from the completed suit on its stand, the specific quality of someone who has made something and is seeing it fully for the first time with the right distance between themselves and it.
She looked up and found him watching her.
Something passed between them across the courtyard that the camera didn’t capture because Marc was adjusting his lens at that moment and his assistant was repositioning a reflector and neither of them was looking at either Sean or Vanessa.
Sean held her gaze.
She held his.
Then Marc called something in French and the moment ended and they were back in the shoot.
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At eleven thirty Marc called the session complete.
He pulled up the images on the full monitor and walked Vanessa through the selections with the specific focused conversation of two people talking about something they both understood at the technical level and the aesthetic level simultaneously.
Sean watched from a respectful distance, changed back into his own clothes.
Marc pulled up the specific frame that Vanessa had discussed with him an hour into the shoot, the one from the south wall in the early morning light when Sean had been looking at the wall and thinking about her behind the monitor.