Nobody tells you that smoke has moods. The machine coughs out a cloud and then the cloud decides, all by itself, whether it wants to be fog, or weather, or a curtain, or nothing. The photographer watches it like a sailor watching the sky. And I stand in the middle of it, arms raised, holding a shape, because a silhouette is not a person, it's an equation, and if my elbow drops three centimetres the equation stops being beautiful and starts being a woman doing calisthenics in a fire.
The rules of silhouette work, as I've learned them: you are your outline and nothing else. The camera will not record your face, your effort, or the fact that your left arm went numb forty seconds ago. It records the gap between your arm and your head, the angle of your chin, the negative space where your waist interrupts the light. You learn to feel your outline from inside it, the way you can feel a word on the tip of your tongue.
Ninety seconds is about the limit, not of strength, of stillness. After ninety seconds the body starts negotiating. It offers you tiny corrections, each one reasonable: just shift the hip, just soften the elbow. You decline them one by one, politely, like a person refusing snacks on a short flight. Then the smoke moves wrong, everyone waits three minutes for it to resettle, and the negotiation starts over from the beginning.
The frame we kept from the last session (hands raised, the haze lit white-violet behind me) took two hours and looks like it took one three-hundredth of a second. That ratio is the whole job. People think modelling is being looked at. Mostly it's arithmetic in the dark, done with your shoulders, while a machine that hates you exhales.
Afterwards, the smoke gets into everything. Hair, coat lining, the bread I bought that morning. For two days I smell faintly of theatrical fog and everyone on the metro assumes I've come from somewhere more interesting than I have. I let them. It's the closest thing my profession has to a perfume, and it's not even the strangest thing I've held still for.