(Photo by Meagan Sample)

There are people who are sort of internet phenomenons.  For years before I had begun making photographs again, I looked at them.  I was a lurker.  Their lives took on mythical proportions of some underground art world where the old rulers and their old rules no longer applied.  The internet made gods and goddesses, or at least made people semi-famous.  I wanted to be so bold.  

Meagan Sample was one of those phenoms.  She was young and wild and all the photographers of a certain internet fame were making pictures with her.  They wrote stories about her and her wild temperament.  Wherever she was, it seemed to me as a lurker and not an insider, crazy things happened.  

She had a twin sister who also modeled, but for whatever reason, though she was a true beauty, too, people didn't write about her as much.  They both lived in New York.  

After I started making pictures again, I began some correspondences with a few of the photographers whose work I had been watching.  One, Frank Petronio, (he is linked on this site), was especially friendly and helpful.  He suggested that I contact a model in my own hometown that he had shot with before.  He wrote to her and said I was a good guy.  She came to my studio, one of the first models I ever worked with (she is the pregnant girl in some of the recent posts).  I was going to NYC one summer, and he suggested I contact the Samples.  He wrote introductions for me, and I contacted the twins by email.  Meagan was stand-offish in a smart-ass way, and it didn't seem that I would meet her.  Her sister, though, was more receptive and suggested that we might meet for a shoot.  But when I got to New York, as things so often will, things went queer.  It was as if she had pulled up my felony record and decided against meeting up with me anywhere in the city.  That, at least, is what it felt like, though later I was told that it had nothing to do with me at all.  But whoever thinks such a thing?

The years passed.  One day, Frank told me that Meagan was in Florida and that I should contact her and see if she would come over to shoot, so I wrote to her again.  She said that she was flying out of my hometown on such and such a day, and that if it worked out, she would come by the studio and we could shoot.  

Shit!  You know? 

When she showed up, she was hung over and beat.  She'd been in a fight in a bar the night before, she said, and went on about the details of all that.  She wanted to smoke a cigarette and so we went out to the loading dock behind my studio.  She lay on the concrete there and pulled up her skirt to get the sun. The fellows who have studios and businesses there were suddenly chatty.  Meagan just kept her eyes closed and sucked in smoke and sun rays and handled the horny boys without effort.  And then, cigarette done, she was ready to shoot.  

She was making her traveling and living money as a model at the time, and she did not do nudes for free, she said.  It was something I didn't really understand as I don't appreciate the connection between nudity and money though I know it is a thing, and so I said O.K. and we began to work.  

She was the most perfect poser I'd ever seen.  Every position she took had perfect lines, perfect tension.  Her poses were pure drama.  And so we shot and looked at the Polaroids, and she began to tell me what to do.  She wanted some close-ups, she said.  And then she said, "Fuck it," and she took off her clothes and we shot like that awhile.  And while we shot and after when we looked at the pictures, she was sweet.  That is how I found her to be which is not the thing I had been led to believe.  But she was. . . so very quiet and gentle and sweet.  

Afterwards, when I sent her pictures, she posted them here and there on her sites.  It was fun for me to see them in the mix with some very good photographers.  She said that she liked them and had liked working with me, too, and of course I liked her more and more.  

We wrote back and forth, and when I went to NYC next, I wrote her and told her I would be there.  We might get together, she said.  She was living in Brooklyn and would come over for a beer.  

I am shy, and am shy about meeting up with people at all, but things did not work out.  She slept late and then had something she had to do, and I guess in some big way, I was relieved.  

Then one night she called.  She was partying on the rooftop of a building in Brooklyn and said I should come over.  If I were normal, of course, I would have gone, but I am not and she was drunk and it was late, and I remembered all the tales that had been told, and so I said no, but thanks.  I could hear the silent, "What--Pussy?" on the other end of the line.  But it is true.  I am.  

A few days ago, I posted a message on one of her sites that caused her to write back, and for part of a weekend day, we wrote back and forth.  She would be in my part of the country this fall, she said, and we could get together.  Hell yes, I said, and I may be in NYC in late September, too.  There were many possibilities.  

Probably. . . if I were normal.  

*     *     *     *     *     

Here is a picture Ed Ross took of her recently.  She said she is going back to California to work with him in a few days.  I don't know. . . I just like the associations.  I am using it as imaginary validation for what I do.  We all need it. 

(Photo by Ed Ross)