Within Reach

I met Kat through my camera in Joshua Tree National Park.

There was room to breathe out there, big boulders, long pockets of shade, the sky opened up wide, and Kat quietly settling herself into it all. In some frames she’s almost an afterthought in terms of scale, just a small figure against all that geology, yet I kept circling back to her. The lift of an arm. A slight twist through the shoulders. The exact way she planted her feet. Tiny choices, and suddenly she wasn’t swallowed by the stone at all.

That’s where it first clicked for me, what this woman could do.

Kat is tall… six foot two, but out there that fact stops being the headline. The photograph hangs on something else, her sense of where she is, and what she’s bringing into the space.

She can echo the line of a rock, let a gesture travel across an empty gap, or draw herself inward until she fits a tight pocket of shade. It’s never just posing beside a landscape, it’s more like the body negotiating with it. Watching her, I started paying closer attention to everything, her decisions, yes, but also the shapes around her that I’d normally rush past.

Photographing someone whose ideas arrive through motion has its own kind of joy. You put down a simple starting point, and then the next thing appears, something you didn’t know to ask for, something you couldn’t have scripted.

Kat has that in her. She’s a terrific figure model, and also simply a good, solid person. Both of those truths sit inside these sessions. The pictures carry her judgement and her inventiveness, and when I think back on making them, what rises up too is how warm it felt to work with her.

On our second session, the world tightened in.

*From our second session together.*

Here she takes that tall frame of hers and folds it down into something compact. One hand crosses to the shoulder, the head dips toward the knees, the other hand finds the floor and closes the loop. It’s all there, contained.

What I loved was how fully she could live inside a frame. Even pulled in close like this, the pose still breathes, little gaps between limbs, a curve the light can travel, a gesture that feels finished, like it knows exactly what it is.

I’d recognise that same awareness again once we brought in the chair.

The arrangement was straightforward, a lightbox overhead, an armchair, and, naturally, Kat.

I had the Hasselblad, my old friend, plus Rollei R3 shot at EI 400. This time we weren’t starved for light. Familiar gear in my hands, and someone in front of me who kept opening doors I hadn’t noticed yet.

Like a lot of my shoots, it started with a thing to play against. Kat tested the chair, tried it on like a new language, and I watched.

One moment she’d stretch upward and the whole picture would become long, almost balanced, nearly symmetrical. Then she’d turn, or shift a knee, or change where the hands landed, and the structure would loosen into something else entirely.

Her attention runs all the way down into the small, unflashy details. Kat knows what the spine can do, what shoulder blades can say, how the back becomes its own terrain. Under that top light, bone turns into line and ridge, and a tiny adjustment changes the entire surface.

I could see the movement coming, but my job was still to catch the instant that felt like the one worth keeping. That was my side of the exchange, watching through the finder, tracking her choices, answering them, then letting the shutter go.

And the next possibility usually arrived from Kat.

That’s part of what I treasure about these pictures. Her modelling isn’t decoration on top of the composition, it’s part of what builds it. Where a hand settles, how far an elbow opens, where the weight drops, those decisions matter before I ever make an exposure.

We also messed around with Rollei Ortho, orthochromatic film rated at ISO 25. I fell for what it did to her skin, it came back with this silvery polish, as if the light had been buffed into the print.

The negative and print from that stretch of the session have already been shown together. They belong here too, another return from the same experiment, Kat, the light, and the pleasure of seeing what the film decided to give us.

Over the span of these sessions, I realised how easily she could adjust to whatever space we were given. The scale swung wildly from one shoot to the next, but her attention to the pose never wavered.

Out among the rocks, a small gesture could stand up inside a huge landscape. In the studio, she could find a whole photograph within the strict edges of a chair.

And later, even the chair had taken enough of the spotlight.

This was the tail end of that shoot. Looking at it now, I can almost hear the picture speaking, plain as day:

“Alright, chair, that’s enough.”

There’s a kind of tenderness in returning to work like this. I remember the photographs I wanted, sure, but I also remember the person whose imagination made them possible. When you meet again over several sessions, it becomes a small shared history.

At our last shoot, I photographed Kat beneath a print of herself I’d made four years earlier.

In the print on the wall she’s upright, her back tall. Below it she’s folded forward, the spine catching the light. Two photographs, taken four years apart, crossing paths inside a single frame.

The image is called *Out of Reach*.

Eleven years went by between uploading it and finally giving it a home in this post. Coming back to it now pulls those sessions close again, the places, the shapes, and my quiet admiration for everything Kat brought into them.

Kat, thank you, for the inventiveness, the trust, and how much pleasure there was in working together. I could offer a beginning. You kept handing me something worth looking at.

*Photographs: Vernon Trent · Featured artist, model and collaborator: Kat*