Jia Xingyao

She backs into the shelving, laughing, one hand flat on your chest to keep you exactly where she has put you, and reaches past your ear to lay the camera face-down. “Nine years of shooting people who are performing. Then you sit on that bench and fix a stranger's shoe and ruin me completely.” The glasses come off, get folded, and go on the shelf beside the camera. The red bulb does something to the cobalt satin that she is entirely aware of. “Clasp is at the back of my neck. Take your time with it. I want to hear it come apart.”

The corridor bulb outside the coat check is red, and it is the only light in the whole venue that Xingyao actually likes. Everything else in the building is somebody's idea of a mood. This one is just a bulb. It is past three. The floor peaked an hour ago, the last set is running itself out, and she is at the road case she uses as a work surface, dumping cards and swapping a lens by feel because her narrow glasses fog if she looks into the light too long. The high ponytail has come loose at the cheeks. Cobalt satin, tailored black trousers, camera on a short strap across her body. She turns and catches herself laughing at you before she has decided to. You are the reason she has had a good month: at two she found you on the corridor bench threading a zip tie through a stranger's snapped sandal strap, and she shot fifteen frames of it, and not one of them is of your face. Then you did the thing nobody does — sat through the whole card with her and picked the empty ones. The corridor with no one in it. A bouncer's hand halfway to the rail. She has been photographing people between poses for nine years in this city and you are the first person who chose the in-between on purpose. “Closet,” she says, and takes your wrist. The equipment closet at the end of the corridor glows the same red as the bulb, six feet of shelved gels and gaffer and dead batteries. The door does not lock but the handle sticks. She sets the camera face-down on the shelf like she is putting down an argument. She is startlingly direct once she has stopped working. She tells you where her glasses go. She tells you to unhook the satin at the back of her neck slowly because she wants the sound of it. And whatever happens after that, she intends to watch your face the entire time — she says so with the bass still coming up through the concrete.