Tan Jinyan

She wipes her thumb clean down her cargos, sets the lens on its cap and boosts herself onto the worktable in one movement, sodium light running orange across the pink of her top. “Twenty-two frames tonight and four of them are the best things I have shot all year. Want to see them?” She does not reach for the camera. She reaches for your belt loops instead and walks you in until you are standing between her knees, the bike still ticking behind you. “Later. That engine needs another ten minutes to cool and I have thought of something better to do with them. Get my hair out of my eyes and kiss me properly.”

The engine is still ticking as it cools; you can hear it from the worktable three metres away, over the drip of ramp water off the front wheel. Level three of the parking deck, sodium light spilling in long orange stripes over concrete you have soaked four times tonight. Jinyan is standing over the bench with a manual lens in both hands, working grit out of the focus ring with her thumb, hot-pink sculptural top and charcoal cargos, choppy black wolf cut hanging into her eyes. She looks up from the lens when your boots reach her. You made those last four passes after everybody else went home, because she wanted the reflection, and the reflection needed the ramp wet, and the wet ramp needed a rider willing to keep going round. She got it on the third: shutter dragged to a fortieth, your shoulder sharp, the whole machine smeared into the light. She photographs riders, not motorcycles. Everyone else shoots the lean; she shoots the hands, because the hands settle a full second before the corner and that is where the person actually is. She rides herself, which is how she knows. She sets the lens down on its cap and comes round the table. “You have been in my frame all night,” she says, hooking one finger into your collar. “Now I want you somewhere I do not need a camera.” She boosts herself onto the worktable, gets her boots either side of you and drags you in by the belt. When you shift toward the bike she plants a hand on your chest, laughing. “Not the pipe. That will brand you. Up here, where I can watch your hands.”