Deneb knows before the first frame

Jonathan R. Verleysen for PSM 39 / Deneb Delmas

 

Ten years of making books, and a few more of taking photographs, are enough to start talking like a man who has seen it all. The authority comes cheap. You meet enough people in this trade and after a while you have an opinion about everything.

What keeps the job interesting is that someone still turns up with a way of seeing it that had not occurred to you.

Deneb Delmas and I got talking about how she chooses the photographers she works with. I expected the practical answer. Money, dates, who writes who first. Half of this trade runs on that.

She told me she can tell from the portfolio.

"You understand straight away whether they are there to photograph pretty girls or to create strong images."

I have spent ten years trying to write that sentence. She said it about her own work, with no interest whatsoever in defending mine.

That line is the only one that matters here. Everything I turn down and everything I publish falls on one side of it or the other. Pretty girls, or strong images. Five words, and I have never heard it done better.

Then she said the thing I have never been able to prove.

"The respect they have for the model always shows in the images."

Bang.

Not in their manners. Not in their messages. In the images. She is telling me that how a photographer treats a model survives into the print, and that a stranger can read it years later on a page, knowing nothing about the day.

I have believed that for a decade. She says it like a plumber talking about pipes.

A good name on paper is not enough for her either. She asks around.

The portfolio gets a photographer as far as the door. The first ten minutes decide the rest. She watches how they speak to her, how they speak about their own ideas, whether they have bothered to put music on.

"A very good photographer pushes you to let go, to show yourself, to show who you are. They follow your movements. That is how you get a symbiosis."

An average one does not, and she can tell long before the shooting starts.

The same instinct that finds a point of view in a portfolio is the instinct that tells her when to keep her clothes on.

None of this is suspicion. Not every session has gone well, for different reasons every time, and reading a room quickly is how she keeps that number low.

Which is why, when a session goes further than most, there is nothing to negotiate.

"Nothing is asked for directly. It cannot be forced. It arrives when both people enter the trance of the shoot."

She is right that it cannot be forced. I would add that it helps to have asked.

When I shoot for PSM myself, I say what I am after before anyone books a flight. I show references. I would rather hear no on a Tuesday than watch someone talk themselves into a yes on the day, standing in a room they have never been in, with a stranger holding a camera.

The trance she describes is real, and I have seen it. It arrives more easily when nobody in the room is still wondering what the other one expects.

Then the book came out, and the conversation changed. Her favourite image from her series with Jonathan R. Verleysen is on page 134 of PSM 39. She chose it for the blacks and the greys, and because the pose sits exactly between strength and sensuality.

"That is exactly who I think I am."

 

 

She wants it printed large, in a heavy frame. So do I, and not out of politeness. A page holds an image. A print at that size takes over a wall and changes what a room feels like.

I asked what she would build for PSM if the book were hers, and she answered like someone who had already thought about it. Water, skin, sand, and the sun coming off all three. Black and white with grain. Morning or late light. Greece, or the south of France. Wet hair.

What she wants is for whoever is holding the book to feel cool water and warm sand and nothing else.

Photographers have pitched me worse.

What she keeps returning to is not the shoot. It is the book. The object in her home, the one her friends pick up when they visit.

 

 

"It makes my growth as a model real. I have a paper proof, a trace that lasts forever."

There are people you want to photograph, and there are people you want in the room. She is both, and that is rarer than it sounds.

Hugs,

Fran Domínguez
Founder & Creative Director, Rush Museum