Overview
Portrait of Camille Oken is a short story in Quarterlives. It is framed as a draft arts-magazine profile, with editorial notes, written by a man named Carter about Camille Oken, a Flagstaff portrait photographer whose work has recently attracted attention.
The story takes place in August 2024 in Flagstaff.
Plot
Carter travels from New York to Flagstaff, Arizona to profile Camille Oken for a Brooklyn arts magazine. The draft is marked with bracketed editorial comments by E.S., who repeatedly criticizes Carter’s language, digressions, and conduct.
Camille picks Carter up at Flagstaff Pulliam Airport in a messy white Corolla. Carter notices her Instagram handle, “angel of light,” and studies her as they drive to his motel. When he tries to begin the interview, Camille says she wants to photograph him first. She explains that she needs to see him in her own work before he can profile her.
After a day spent recovering from an altitude headache, Carter agrees to the portrait. Camille first brings him to a Flagstaff bar with several local friends. Carter feels out of place among the musicians and cooks, but he remains focused on Camille. Later, because Camille has been drinking, they sit in her parked car instead of driving. She tells Carter that she fears change, staying the same, aging, being left behind, and especially forgetting the way the present feels.
On Sunday, Carter meets Camille at her studio near the red rocks outside Flagstaff. She shows him printed portraits and explains her four-color process, in which black, cyan, yellow, and magenta are separately applied to canvas from a photo negative. She says a session can last from seventeen minutes to a day and a half.
During Carter’s session, Camille sets lights, cloths, skylights, and music but does not immediately take a photograph. Carter is uneasy as the subject rather than the observer. As hours pass, he and Camille discuss fear, purpose, art, her parents, incidents from her past, and a former anonymous collage website she ran in 2010.
Carter eventually shares his own background, including his fear of solitude and his doubts about graduate school. He loses his sense of time and imagines past, future, romance, marriage, children, and death as if they are all present. When he begins to cry, Camille takes a single photograph and tells him he can now profile her.
Carter cannot write a conventional profile. He calls Camille and asks whether she will date him if he stays in Flagstaff, quits his job, and has his belongings sent from New York. She initially laughs, then takes the question seriously.
Carter resigns from the magazine, says he may stop writing, and reports that he is meeting Camille at a coffee shop called Sweet Remembrance. The final editorial note instructs that the profile be killed, a Lucy Dacus piece be rerun, and Carter be removed from the payroll.