Steadier Than Me

The career plan was fully formed by the time I was fourteen: photograph women without their clothes on. The logic seemed airtight. A copy of Playboy featuring a German model named Nina Bott—who I was, in the way only a fourteen-year-old can be, completely destroyed over—crystallized the whole ambition into something that felt like a vocation. Camera. Beautiful women. Repeat until retired. Done.

It did not work out. The equipment cost money I didn’t have. On the rare occasions when I was simultaneously near an attractive woman and a camera, my hands stopped functioning correctly. And it turned out that almost nobody actually wanted to take their clothes off in front of me—a few drunk ex-girlfriends being the notable exceptions, and even then the results were not gallery-ready by any honest assessment.

Viktor Vauthier, working out of East London, appears to have solved every problem I encountered. He’s already operating in legitimate company alongside photographers like Richard Kern, Terry Richardson, and Keiichi Nitta—which is either high praise or a complicated endorsement depending on how you feel about that particular school. He shot the cover of I Love Fake Magazine. He runs a Vimeo account with his girlfriend that suggests the creative partnership extends into the work itself. Among his subjects: the Swedish model Lisa Olsson, who I’d been following from a distance for a while. His subjects look genuinely comfortable in front of his camera, which is the hardest thing to actually achieve and the thing that most photographers never manage.

Looking through everything he’s made, the steady envy is difficult to avoid. Not the bitter kind—more the feeling of watching someone do precisely the thing you once imagined for yourself, doing it well, and knowing you would have been a poor substitute. There are worse outcomes than recognizing good work. It’s just slightly worse when you recognize it as the work you wanted to do.