The river in November does not negotiate. We arrived at six, when the light was still deciding what kind of day to be, and the photographer looked at the water, then at me, then said, with the gentleness of a man delivering a diagnosis: the frame only works from in there.
Here is what cold water does to modelling. First it deletes everything you were planning. All the arranged elegance, the rehearsed angles of the neck, gone within thirty seconds, because the body under real conditions has no spare capacity for pretending. What is left is the true stillness, the one you cannot perform: shoulders honest, jaw set a little, eyes with nothing extra in them. Photographers chase that look through entire careers of comfortable studios. The river hands it to you immediately, in exchange for your feet.
We worked in rounds. Ninety seconds in the water, then out to the flask and the towel and the assistant whose entire job had become my ankles. In the frames from the first rounds I am a professional standing in a river. In the frames from the last rounds I am simply a fact in the landscape, the same order of thing as the stones and the reeds. Those are the ones that ran.
My grandmother, seeing the pictures, said what she always says about location work: in her day the river came to the studio, painted on a backdrop, and everyone kept their socks on. Then she looked for a long time at the one of me among the reeds, and conceded, in her way: the water is doing something the paint never did. Highest praise the woman has issued this decade.
I keep a small theory that every model has one element. Studio models are fire, all controlled burn. Street models are air, weather in motion. I am apparently water in November: something that goes quiet, and clear, and slightly too cold to argue with. I can live with that. My feet have almost forgiven me.