The Gift

• Feature article •

Late one evening my phone rang.

Normally I would not answer at that hour, but somehow this call felt different.

The number contained an unusual number of 1s and 9s.

I looked at the clock:

11:11.

In a fraction of a second, I had already prepared the speech I would give the stranger on the other end if the call turned out not to be important.

I answered with a simple “Hello?” — and immediately heard a male voice thanking me profusely for my “flexibility”.

“How can I help?” I asked, sounding slightly exhausted.

“I'd like to surprise my wife with an artistic nude photo shoot,” came the rushed reply.

I stood there in silence, trying to listen not only to his words but to the feeling behind them.

Before the stranger had even explained the real reason, I could sense that this was about something much deeper.

I asked when he wanted to arrange the shoot.

His answer surprised me.

“Tonight, if possible,” he said, his voice slightly breaking.

At that moment I remembered the carefully prepared sentence with which I had planned to politely send him to bed.

But those were not the words that came out of my mouth.

I simply said:

“All right.”

What?

I asked myself.

Did I really just say that?

Yes.

I had.

We agreed to meet at the studio around an hour and a half later.

I arrived.

They did not.

I called the phone number full of 1s and 9s, but the line simply disconnected.

I felt cheated and deeply disappointed.

It is remarkable how much damage a disappointment can do to an otherwise ordinary day.

Three days later, the wound had already begun to fade when I received a text message from the same number.

Everything came rushing back.

He apologised and asked me to send him an invoice so he could compensate me.

He also said they absolutely still wanted to come, and he wanted to pay for that session in advance as well.

I did not understand the situation.

I sent nothing.

I did not reply.

I let it go.

Five months later, close to Christmas, I received a request for a gift voucher.

The phone number looked very similar to the number from that strange night, but I had deleted the original messages and could no longer identify it with certainty.

And the requested service was artistic nude photography.

It was December 2017.

Every year I review gift vouchers that have not yet been redeemed, hoping that one day the recipients will finally come.

By 2020, this was the only voucher left that had been outstanding for more than six months.

Until Thursday this week.

That day, everything finally made sense.

- The reason the shoot had been so urgent that night was that the woman was scheduled for a mastectomy the following morning because of a small tumour. They never made it to the studio because she became unwell and had to go directly to hospital. Doctors had already recommended that she remain there before the operation, but she had stubbornly resisted.

- She planned to use the voucher for a nude shoot in spring 2018, but at the end of December she became pregnant with her son and decided she would use the gift for a maternity shoot instead.

- When the right moment arrived, she could not find an available appointment with me, and her son was born earlier than expected.

- At the beginning of 2019 she wanted to redeem the voucher for a family photo shoot, but her husband received a job abroad, making the plan impossible.

- This year his foreign assignment finally ended, only for the pandemic to interfere with the photographs again. In the meantime she had become physically fit and had also recovered emotionally.

- On Wednesday evening, acting on a sudden intuition, she checked the booking calendar on my website. I had just opened a time slot because somebody had cancelled. She immediately booked it.

Three years later, the gift finally reached its destination. :)

By writing this blog post, I am also fulfilling my model's request.

Through her story she would like to tell every reader:

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“Everything happens in its own time. We only need to trust, and our intuition will guide us along the way.”

Norbert Bánhalmi instagram.com/banhalminorbert

Art photography is a sensitive creative process in which the body, personality and authentic self all have space to emerge.

Part of the BANHALMI ecosystem

For the professional context and practical side of portrait photography, visit the BANHALMI professional website. Related art series, books and exhibitions are preserved in the BANHALMI ART archive.