Free Lime's Photograph by Leif Davidsen Page A

mystery woman could quite easily be in the white suitcase in Don Alfonzo’s pleasant house near Madrid.
    I checked my emails and replied to a couple of letters. They were mainly from sources telling me about possible hits. Rumours and hearsay about where the famous were planning to go on holiday or were holidaying already. They didn’t have to be sensational photographs. Every picture of someone well-known in a private, informal situation where his or her vulnerability was on display wasworth a fortune. I decided I wouldn’t follow up any of the tips, but I thanked my sources and transferred the $1,000 that I thought one of the informants had earned. I emailed a tip to a young photographer who worked for us as a freelancer in London and who deserved a break. I had been there too once, jostling for position in the heaving crowd of photographers waiting outside a restaurant in Kensington, because word was that a royal was having lunch there. Hours of waiting for that thousandth of a second. The photographer’s lot: hurry up and wait!
    The diva arrived with her dresser, and I spent an enjoyable hour while the old poseur sat for me in my studio, chatting about men past and present and affectionately telling indiscreet tales from behind the scenes. She was from a bygone era, but she had a marvellous face and, being the great actress that she was, she knew how to employ every one of her hundreds of face muscles. I tried various kinds of lighting. She wanted to look mysterious and enigmatic. She also wanted to appear 20 years younger. If the photograph was good enough, she would insist that the theatre used it for their publicity. I also had a number of authors on my client list. It had got to the point where the photograph on the back cover was more important for sales than the content of the novel. We lived in a media-driven age where image was everything and substance nothing. Everyone in the spotlight wanted to play the role they had chosen. They would claim that they were just being themselves, but I knew better than anyone that they really wanted to play a role, and that they were miserable if they weren’t able to perform it through to the finale. Even the tragic, beautiful Princess Diana was both actor and victim. She hated us when we lay in wait, but loved us when we could be used in her power struggle with husband and Palace. She couldn’t live without the media, and she ended up being devoured by it. She thought she could choose, but once you’ve invited the media in, the guests won’t leave until they’reready. If you live by the media, you die by the media. Either abruptly, or that slow, painful death when no one points the viewfinder at you any more. When you’re no longer a story, just a memory. When emptiness strikes and the flashbulbs go out. Fame can be both a drug and an aphrodisiac. I made my living from today’s narcissism and insatiable appetite for gossip. I was the man sitting in the middle of the global village square, passing on gossip about the famous. By making visible their sorrows and joys, infidelities and loneliness when they were abandoned, I both mythologised and humanised them at one and the same time. But I needed something more. So I took portraits, because in a photograph of a face I could, if I was lucky and skilful, lay bare the individual’s soul in all its fragile nakedness as I peeled away their chosen persona without their realising what I was doing. They couldn’t hide from me in a portrait. I revealed the depths of their being.
    Afterwards, I spent a few hours in the darkroom with the diva’s portrait, but I still didn’t think we had hit exactly the right expression, so I decided I would have her to sit again. I was happy in the darkroom. The outside world disappeared. The darkroom was soundproof, and light-proof so nothing disturbed me as I created my own world and saw my art emerge under the red light. The chemical processes were simple, but it was my precise attention