Panzer's Note:
Only the opening two verses of this story are told in a present-tense narrative. The rest is purely third-person. It wasn't just for creative purposes, but because I felt it best served both context and subtext, establishing the story's concept whilst capturing the fictional artist's craft, photography, in the moment.
This is part one of a very long story that works hard on emotion, chemistry and atmosphere. If you don't like to be teased toward a huge emotional payoff, I have other stuff you can have a three minute handshake to, filthy as this will be.
Enjoy!
*****
1
The true photographer knows many worlds other than this one. The true photographer is more than just an individual trained to capture images. They, like those creating with clay, ink, paint, or celluloid, are artists of a unique craft.
They are journalists and storytellers, visionaries and messengers, communicating through the images that they create, the moods that they capture, and the conclusions they invite us to interpret through our own perceived realities.
They have the unique ability to capture the essence of the human soul, to capture fleeting moments of beauty and perfection otherwise unseen to the roving and easily distracted eye and lost in time forever.
And while some seek the easy money, turning glamour models and celebrities into polished plastic candy, others like Daniel Jackson, with the natural power for provocation, invite society's more cultured and courageous to take a look at themselves through the worlds he creates.
Until the final product is created, nobody, no assistant or model, not even Daniel himself sees with his own eyes what the book page or the canvas will show. The camera's eye sees only what is, not what has yet to be.
Only Daniel's instincts as a photographer tells him that his direction is true, and only his heart sees in its own way, that what he sees is true to that which the soul feels. Like a compass or a divining pendulum, Daniel is naturally attuned as an artist to compose imagery as though it were music. It flows and it yields to both the real and the ideal, free to do with dream and reality as it pleases.
And from within his private studio on an uninterrupted Saturday afternoon, Daniel alone with his two life models - a slender and naturally beautiful but ripening late fifties blonde woman with cropped grey hair, and a much younger, quite athletic dark-haired man of about thirty - waltzes from scene to scene, letting his latest opus, his latest story, unfold and to tell itself with an honesty that could never be scripted by any wordsmith in quite the same way.
The studio floor itself covers the size of a studio apartment, or about the size of two living rooms in a three-bedroom house and to look at it through eyes that see only threadbare reality, one would see something utilitarian, maybe even clinical, and so bereft of imagination, because the imagination is as of yet intangible.
Three walls are solidly black, the fourth wall - the one the audience never sees, for it only sees through the fourth wall - is busy with camera tripods, spotlights, shelves bearing rolls of different coloured and textured wallpapers, and props, and gels to colour the lights. Daniel's current project needs no scenery for the eye to see. Humanity and flesh are all he wants to see.
And only Daniel, through the photographer's instinct, and his heart and soul, sees the true picture. Mary and Adam see in their minds a script to be played out, and a mental picture of the story they're playing out, and they are both consummately professional in their patience, just enjoying the experience of liberating themselves through character, although in essence they are truly playing out who and what they are behind the social masks they must wear.
On one breadth there lies a bed that has yet to be messed and slept in - another prop that will be used this afternoon. Thrown to the floor on the other side are a collection of cushions and pillows and sheets, which recently hid the naked forms of Adam and his motherly counterpart.
And in the dark, with only the contrasting golden glow of one yellow-gelled spotlight and the reflectors and mirrors otherwise throwing back ambient light from the other side, the next scene comes into play, the world around them disappearing beyond the spotlight.
And all that remains within their triangle is an awkward sexuality, which speaks much like the silence around them, but instead of travelling like sound, it hangs in the air with an excitingly heavy gravitational pressure.
2
Adam seats himself on a fine antique wooden chair, his more than notable erection now having subsided enough to continue. It won't be long before he rises to the occasion again after his mother straddles him and perches herself high up in his lap, pressing her sex down against his. Her eyes convey that this should be nothing new...
Daniel doesn't take exception when these things happen. Sometimes they have to. Sometimes what the camera doesn't see is what makes the magic. In honesty, at least being quietly honest with himself, he enjoys the awkwardness and the bare-naked glory of it all. He enjoys the thrill of imagining how people will react when they see what he has done here.
And Adam is admittedly quite the specimen from top to bottom, one of the best he's had the privilege of acquiring for the project, and without a hint of vanity. He doesn't have the etiquette of a professional model, and yet he is naturally anything other than amateur. He has game, and he seems to enjoy letting Mary know it.
Birdlike, she waits for direction from the photographer, the nipples of her slight breasts hard and visibly protruding, despite how well-heated the studio is. There has been no shortage of goose-bumps from the outset. They come and go with certain fleeting touches between Mary and her son. When her naked vagina touches Adam, causing him to rise again, another chill causes her breasts and forearms to react.
Over by one radiator is a spray-bottle of water mixed with oil, which has waited two hours for this moment. Daniel retrieves it and carefully sprays Adam with the warm mixture, from his hairline and his face to his chest, to create the illusion of fever.
The camera lens sees sweat beading at every pore of Adam's golden skin, his strong symmetrical shoulders glowing with a fainter sheen. It's a convincing illusion. It almost advertises his bare flesh the way beer commercials sell you your own thirst.
'This could get very... slippery,' Mary hints softly in the silence, her grey eyes smiling as they meet Adam's. The young man sneaks a cheeky smirk as Daniel lowered to his haunches to set up the tripod for the macro lens.
'Well, we'll try not to go crazy with the oil,' Daniel assured humouredly. 'No promises though.'
'It's not the oil I'm thinking about,' Mary admits quite frankly, which catches him by surprise. Daniel can only laugh inwardly, wondering how excited she was already, as he attaches his faithful Nikon to the tripod base and focuses so that the side of Adam's face will take up close to half of the intended picture.
