GLAMOUR

Computers never forget. Maybe that's why they tend to come in grey cases. I found what follows when I was surfing the net. Maybe it was a wrong click on the mouse. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I was so intrigued, I entered it in my favourites, but when I came to look for it again, all I got was error 404 - no such site, no such web-page, no such person. But it was still there on my hard disk, in the cache, a kind of electronic ghost, so I thought I'd share it with you.

I used to be a glamour photographer. Funny word, glamour. I looked it up once. It used to mean the way that fairies could trick you, make you think you were seeing something you weren't. You know, you're crossing some desolate moorland, it's too late, too cold, too wet and you're too tired for this, when all at once you see a house you'd never noticed before, or an inn maybe, all full of lights and noise and dancing and merry, merry people, and you go in and join them to get out of the dark and the cold and the rain, and then, in front of the roaring fire, you fall asleep, and wake up looking at the damp grey morning sky through the blackened rafters of a ruined cottage. If you're lucky, it's next morning, and you're only one night older. If not - well, I'm sure you know the story as well as I do. But I don't think you'll know this one.

What's glamour got to do with photography, you say? The camera never lies, after all. But cameramen do. Amateurs probably worse than professionals. At one end you have the ones who turn up for a glamour photography session without any film in their camera. They just want to ogle the model and not have their ogling disturbed by worrying about f-numbers- well, not that kind of f anyway. Then there are the ones who actually do take the pictures and persuade the girls to go that little bit further by promising them exposure, in return for exposure. Yes, well, you don't have to look that word up in the dictionary to know what it means, do you?

By and large, professionals don't do that kind of thing. It'd get too complicated, because you need to work with a lot of girls to make a living. Do we cast glamour over them? Yes, as far as we can. The right lighting, the right camera angle, telling them how they look, turning them on - usually just with words, because you don't want to mess about with the focal distance when you've got it just right. You do have to tell them how they look, because some of them put on a face that's supposed to represent the sublime peak of sexual climax and it's more like a severe attack of indigestion or somebody straining to have a bowel motion when they're constipated. Sometimes they make the same kind of little squeaky-grunty noises.

As you can tell, the glamour's stopped working on me. Maybe it's over-exposure. Like a friend of minewho spent a year in Indoneasi and now has to put tabasco on his cornflakes. There's plenty the glamour does still work on though. The ones that look at the pictures. I wonder what they get out of it, apart from sexual excitement followed by sexual relief. You kind of hope it stops them bothering real women, though you never know. Photographs are always there. Always available. Don't have to be talked to. Don't have to be taken out to dinner. You can ignore them for years and then go back to them. If you keep on getting different ones, nobody worries, and if you stick obsessively to the same model nobody worries either. With some of them, it gets a bit like trainspotting, you know, they have to have every shot of every set, especially the obscure one that only appeared in that little South American magazine. Then they get involved with fellow-collectors and compare notes and swap things between themselves, as if they were foreign stamps or cigarette cards. You should see some of the newsgroups.

Don't get me wrong, though. I'm not cold. I understand obsession. There was Janie, you see. She had all kinds of other names put to her photographs - don't ask me why. It might be copyright issues - or it might be men wanting to show they have control over a mystery that's really beyond them. But Janie was the name she gave herself, and that's the most important thing. It was after Janie that I gave up being a glamour photographer. After she died, I mean. Was there ever anything between us? No, I don't think so. I got on with her very well, I thought. Better than anybody else - as far as I could tell. But nothing more than that. And there may have been men - or other things - I didn't know about.

What was it about her? Well - she looked as though she was enjoying herself. She looked as though she loved her own body and all the pleasure it could give her. She didn't look guilty or naughty or randy - she just looked expectant and then satisfied. She must have started quite young, and in those early shots you could see the pleasure she took in being the centre of attention for all these older people. She showed off her attributes - that's what they were, attributes, you know, like saints have attributes, the things they carry with them that tell you who they are and what their special area may be. Her special area was sex. No - that's the wrong word, somehow. Maybe ecstasy's better. Not the little white pill. The feeling.

She asked me once - we talked about everything during those sessions - whether I thought dying would be anything like orgasm. 'You know,' she said, 'your self just gets wiped out completely, and you don't mind at all.' Well, I wasn't sure I did know - after all, I'm only a man, and it's different for us. But it happened that my younger brother, the clever one, who did English at university, and then went straight into advertising - he gives me some work now and then - he always liked to talk to me about my job - understandable when you're his age - and he wanted to sort of repay me in kind for the photos I let slip his way, so he told me about this poem, by a man called Crashaw, A Hymn to St Teresa of Avila, all about sweet wounds bleeding and how pleasant dying was, and how union with God was just like union with the beloved. It wasn't that hard to understand when he explained it. He always was plausible. Still is. Anyway, I told Janie, and she went all quiet and dreamy, with a kind of inward glow. Great session, that was. You can still see it all over the Web. Funny, her being dead, and most people looking at those pictures have no idea. To them, she's still full of life. Very full of it.

Now Janie wasn't perfect. Who is? She had a badly messed-up foot. Had a bicycle for Christmas when she was a kid and got her foot caught in the chain. All right most of the time, you could choose your angle, but you had to take care on beaches, because it showed in the footprints. Well, imperfect or not, one day she died. I wasn't there. Some mass model shoot on a semi-tropical island out of season, thanks to a cheap charter-flight. Drink. Drugs - soft ones. They just found her dead in the morning. Said she choked on her own vomit. Too drunk or drugged to know what was happening to her. And I chucked up the game. It seemed such a waste to me. Of course, you knew none of the models would last, because everybody wanted fresh flesh, but you hoped they'd get enough money out of it while they did last to do something proper afterwards. You could see them worrying, though, and I didn't want to watch that any more. And Janie was gone. She was the glamour for me. The others only pretended they were feeling ecstasy. She really did. I was getting disenchanted anyway. I'd taken to thinking how naff the furniture was in British shoots. Eastern European sets had really beautiful busts in them - statues, I mean, of course - and genuine eighteenth century leather-bound books - and all we had was a threadbare sofa from MFI.

So I went into travel brochures first of all. I do food now. It's easier. Almost all of it studio work. You don't have to wait for the light to be right or the rain to stop. Mark you, the food goes off faster than those girls ever did. Ten minutes you've got, if you're lucky. Mostly only five. You don't want a skin on your gravy. And it's best if you can catch that hint of steam rising.

It was a Cornish beach I was shooting. Somewhere on the Lizard, west-facing. Winter, so it was nice and empty. The seasons don't matter. Only the light. The most unbelievably glorious sunset. Tripod-work, of course. Really long exposure times. I'd just shot a sequence and come up for air, to look at the whole scene and decide whether it was worth another film before the light really went, when I saw this naked girl down on the sands, half-silhouetted, long fingers of golden sunshine caressing her breasts as she turned and twirled and arched her back. One look was enough to persuade me that if I could only sign her up with exclusive rights we'd both of us make our fortunes. I knew instinctively how I'd photograph her. It would be like making slow, gentle, infinitely anticipatory love with the camera.

I left the camera behind on its tripod - awkward to carry, it'd be safe enough, out of season, no one around - and scrambled down the rocks, getting a bit scraped and battered as I did so. As I hit the beach, I saw she was looking at me, and I realised there was something very familiar about her. But I couldn't see her face - the sun was full behind her. She jerked her head, as if saying, 'Follow me!' and scampered off, turning every few steps as she ran, to see if I really was following her. Who wouldn't have done, if she'd given them that nod of the head? It promised everything, every dream, every sensation, every intimate touch of the soul and the body you could imagine. And after the love-making, there would be perfect peace, perfect satisfaction.

I lost sight of her in the shadow of the rocks. That didn't matter, because I knew that there was no other way out of the cove. If she climbed the rocks, the sunlight would pick her out. If she tried swimming, she'd be an instantly visble black shape in that sea of sunset gold. I watched for five minutes. Ten. Fifteen. The sun had gone by now. It was getting cold. I felt the incoming tide wash over my trainers, and looked down in surprise. That was when I noticed the footprints. They were Janie's. There could be no mistake. For a moment I thought of racing back, getting the camera, photographing the evidence. Then I thought: Let her go. What do you need more photographs for? There are enough photographs, anyway. And I stood, and waited, and watched, while the sea washed all her footprints away and the legs of my jeans got soaked up to the knees.

As I say, I stick to food now. You know where you are with food. And after you've photographed it, you mostly get to eat it. Not quite as fresh as it was when you started, but you can't have everything. And all in all, I'd rather have the food than a photograph of it.

12.xii.2000, 9.30 pm. to midnight