With Katia, luckily, this was super cool from the beginning. She arrived on time, even though she came by car. Katia was only 21 years old, when we first met. I stayed in a beautiful apartment very close to Basilika Sacre Coeur.
I rushed down the staircase to open the doors for her. In Paris you need pin codes to open the front doors of buildings. They are something like 7-3-2-9-A. I am very bad in remembering such codes, but I had it in my phone.
We used a very tiny elevator to get upstairs. It was not larger than one square meter, but still not the smallest elevator, I have seen in Paris. Last year, I stayed in a hotel where I had to put my suitcase in the elevator alone. There was no space left for me.
But back to Katia. We connected right away. It is mandatory to find the same wavelenghth. And if only for the period of the shoot.
To warm up, I show the girls what kind of accessories I have brought to the set and explain the ideas that I have. I also offer them drinks and food and play the music they like.
I simply imagine what would make me feel chilled when having to undress in front of a stranger.
Katia had known my work which was great. It happens very often that the girls have no idea who they work with. When a model deals with who she's going to work with, that always is a good sign.
As working with Katia was such a breeze, I asked her if she could imagine to work with me again. And I also said, she should not answer right away, because I wanted to make sure, she does not give a polite answer, but a very honest one. As she became the cover model of Sublime, you can tell, what her answer was. I photographed her once every year until the book got published.
Whenever I am in Paris and pass the street where this shoot took place, I have to look up to the balcony with the tree. That's the house where the shoot happened. I get a bit of nostalgia, but especially because those were such lovely moments when we created the photographs. All the pictures on this page are outtakes. Not only outtakes in the sense of that they are not in the book. They are also unretouched. Not so bad, after all.
While I am totally in love with the pictures we took, I decided to print only four pages from this Paris' set in Sublime. I simply have so much more great images from Katia.