Monday, September 19, 2016

"In the course of two decades, a medical secretary in Paris persuaded scores of renowned photographers to take her picture"

NY:
He had agreed to her request because, he said, “I could tell this project came from an obsessive mind, this strange project of being photographed by photographers she liked—not those she thought were famous, but those she liked.” When they eventually met, he had been taken aback. “She was very ordinary, a very normal-seeming person. I had thought, based on her letter, that she might be unusual.”

...

Methodically, and recording her activities in brief, elliptical diary entries, she sought out other artists, explaining how she had encountered their work and asking to be used in it. Months later, after seeing her work with other photographers, Sieff asked her back to his studio and finally made an image with her.

By 1990, Mège’s collection had grown to around sixty images—most of them black-and-white, and almost all nude, as she preferred to be photographed. With savings from the secretarial job she found at the hospital, she had travelled to Liège, Amsterdam, Lausanne, Basel, Barcelona, Prague, and Caracas to meet with artists.