I noticed her standing a long time in the middle of a sculpture by David Smith. I couldn't help taking this shot. She seemed to have a purpose to her place dead center in Glesson's work. Was she meditating? I watched her for 15 minutes and then went back to work in the studio in the basement of the art museum.

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I took this shot from another part of the gallery, unseen, except by the security guard David Fortuno. He too had noticed the young woman standing transfixed in front of art pieces in the museum: "She spent thirty minutes just touching the Goldsworthy piece yesterday. She's here almost every day, and she just moves through the museum one gallery room at a time." We laughed about it, and I went back to work, thinking I'd never see the art enthusiast again, until David rang the studio: "Her name is Chantal and she's from the mountains in France, and she's outside right now, hanging onto the edge."  

I walked past her, and she was indeed hanging onto the edge, the spectacular sharp wedge designed by architect I.M. Pei when he was commissioned with the museum that would house the world's greatest art collection. The building is two triangles, and Pei wanted at least one angle to represent the sharp edge of a triangle's point. 

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When he was told that visitors would inevitably want to rub their hands along that edge, Pei told a press conference that "a triangle's energy is always something that should be touched, and the entire gallery is a series of triangular motifs, so if I pass by and see a young woman hanging from the edge of the triangle, I will know that she is drawing energy from the place, and isn't that what you want from public buildings? To give energy?"

The guard calls me two days later: "She's under Calder." I leave the studio and find her in the middle of the atrium. Other guards and a visitor or two watch her standing still, and are transfixed. We're all beginning to think it's some sort of art performance piece.

She notices me taking her picture among the Pissaros, and I have to admit that I've taken several pictures of her, all in the name of art, and she laughs at the lame line. Her name is Chantal Foix, and she's from the Pyrenees, part French and part Basque. She says she's going to sit with Toulouse Lautrec and I'm welcome to shoot if I wish to.

The guard Fortuno, who I've known for 15 years, closes the gallery room when he sees me with Chantal Foix, and we have a few minutes alone to get a good shot with the Lautrec paintings. Her shoulders are gorgeous and I ask if she's a swimmer: "No, volleyball and archery," she says, but seems slightly annoyed that I've commented about her appearance, so I get out of her eyesight to shoot.

But when I get in front of her to shoot from a different angle, she strikes a pose, no question. I shoot several times, and she moves her chin each time, an inch of difference, each shot revealing a different person: there is chilly mystery here, I think, and she barely acknowledges me when I say so long and head back to the basement, past Fortuno, the guard, who gives me a thumb's up and whispers, "I'll be in touch when I think she's in a good pose for you!"

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Two weeks later, Chantal Foix is back, and I get the call from David Fortuno: "The girl's with the buffalo and it looks like she's crying." I take my camera and walk up to the second floor of the old wing, and there she is, chewing her lip. She doesn't remember me, but I show her the picture I took of her in front of Lautrec, and I see her eyebrow raise. "You have a studio downstairs somewhere?" Yes, I say, would you like to see it? We head into the lower levels of the art museum.

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I notice she is dressed exactly the same as she was the first time I'd seen her. I mention it, carefully, and then show her the picture of her in front of Lautrec, and she says, "I'm trying to get somebody's attention, so I want them to remember who I am." It's a mysterious answer and I leave it alone, without response, but this odd reply will later make much more sense. And besides, I'm simply interested in shooting her now and not worrying about her motivations.

She won't look at the camera, but changes her pose slightly with each click of the shutter. I let her simply act as she wishes, and then she surprises me.

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She stands up and lifts her dress as I shoot, and keeps the dress lifted for more than 25 shots, before she drops it and picks up her purse and leaves, nodding at me slightly as she walks out. There is a tiny hint of a smile, as if she feels some small relief. Like any idiot with a camera, I find myself wondering if I'll ever get to shoot her again. Even the guard is worried: "She left pretty brusque-like, man, did you scare her away?" But he knows me well, I know what I want from a shoot, but I never press to get it: a person's secret self is given to you and never trapped, or else you find yourself with an enemy.

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I see her next in front of Vincent's genius. "He was right on top of it, the best craftsman, just smashing the strokes onto the canvas," she says softly when I stand next to her. "I can imagine him daubing the brush without even looking and then swiping three times before daubing again, and just when he learned to do what he was doing, at that exact moment in his knowledge, he kills himself." 

We are outside, and Chantal walks over the black pond as if the slabs of concrete are radiated. She is again in the same dress, same purse, same sunglasses and sandals. I wonder if she has been noticed by whomever she is trying to attract? "If you know you have nowhere else to go, and you are doomed to staying in the same place, I guess that's an excuse for suicide," she says. I am about to say something about van Gogh's family, the world's greatest art collectors, and how they wished to destroy every one of his 2,041 paintings, but Chantal asks me, "Can I some to the basement studio and have you shoot me in something else?" I just laugh at her: "You're a mystery, so you do just what you want, and if I'm there I'll shoot and otherwise you can curse me for not being where I should be, but I won't make any plans for you." She laughs, a shy gurgle, and I am surprised to hear it: is this the first time I've heard her happy?

She concentrates with each click. She's brought a lacy top and simply walks behind a screen to change out of her dress. It's the next day, and she is quiet, unsmiling, aloof, oozing secrets. We take 100 pictures or so, and she leaves without expressing any interest in seeing the edited versions.

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I find her with this marvelous sculpture the next day. I wonder if she has made her mysterious connection yet, and am about to bring it up when she says "I am torn between innocence and breaking rules." We look at the nude sculpture, and then walk into the next gallery, to Monet, to the impressionists, where she says she wants to make a point about innocence.

The way you grow up, the things you remember when nothing had a cost and there wasn't an end to anything. Every pulse of your blood now is the sound of a coin being taken from the bank of your time. You become poor, and then broke, and timeless, and forgotten, How do you capture the power you have now, in youth? 

I have it, she thinks. I can change my surroundings. Not with beauty or youth or desire. But with power. No weapons, she says, just my own hands. I can change everything, even how I remember my childhood and my innocence. We look at this painting for a long time. And then she shows me a cardigan she's made with her own hands. Can you shoot me in this?

She is careful as she slips out of her dress and into her own sweater. She walks barefoot around the studio and keeps her eyes away from my lens. And then there is a spot where her own focus gets sharp, and she looks up at the camera.

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The first time I see her naked she looks right at me as if to dare me to look anywhere but at her face. Innocence is not impressionistic here: a hard reality is in her posture, cold, dangerous.

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A man is a hunter, eyes peeled for wild animals or ovulating females, Men look to survive, and kill to mate. So vision becomes corrupted when you are reminded of the duty of your species, to survive, to pass those genes from one throw-away machine to the next, from body to younger body to younger body. Chantal Foix, whose real name I now know is Chantal de Lourdes Foix, half Basque, half Occitane, from the mountains between Spain and France, is running out of time and wants to be seen as some people imagine her, the creator of a new species, one without equal or predecessor. Sui Generis.

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With her own hands, she said, without weapons. I remember as I catch them, cautious machines, defender and utility. I make a point to ask her about shooting her hands, and she nods, yes, next time.

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A character falls out of a spaceship wearing only a fur, and rolls around with an angel in a nest of feathers, and becomes Jane Fonda, an actor, and Chantal in her sweater is an assassin, a handmade version, no weapons, I get it.

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We have been shooting for a bit, and still she poses. How many different versions of herself can she show, she wonders. What's missing is color, she says, and I will bring it tomorrow. I laugh, Right, whatever you say, but do not tell her that I won't be here.

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She knows I am behind her without looking. "This unknown painter, a Dutchman in the age of maritime wonder, painted this harbor in a way no conservator can explain," she whispers. "Here is light, coming from color, the brightest object in the museum, it needs no lighting. I don't get too close to this painting by Abe de Verwer, because I might fall in."

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She steps away, a foot backward. She keeps looking, waiting for something to leap from the canvas. An idea, a meme, a way to remember something she doesn't know. She asks me if I am ready to shoot? Of course, I say. Good, says she. Can you shoot me in a mirror?

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The mirror is outside, a trick of glass triangles, and we play a game of sight, until she disappears and becomes a figment of my imagination. I am alone among mirrors, and the image of her is simply an afterglow of a private mystery I do not need to share. 

I am whisked away to the Arctic, and find myself in a space storm that disrupts electricity in the northern hemisphere. Of course I think of my mysterious visitor at the art museum, and wonder what she is waiting for, to what end, and wondering if I want to know. If she is found by whatever she is waiting for, would her visits stop? The Arctic provides an excuse, a test, to see if I can shoot without this sense of mystery.

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And as always, the aurora cures everything, wipes the mind clean, makes your emotions a blank slate, because nothing is as grand as this shattering show. The sky falls on my head, and bathes me in living green, and when I go back to the museum it is with regret at the black sky, lightless.

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Except she is very real. Commanding shots as she moves through the studio the next morning. She was sitting at the door as I came to work, reading a book of physics by George Gamow. As I unlock the door to the studio she is slipping off her blue flowered dress, so she can walk into the studio naked. Color, color, she says.

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It starts that way, with soft color, but Chantal pushes for more hue, more distortion. I bring out the gels, and start the way I always have, with warm tones.

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But Chantal Foix knows this is the last shot, and urges more brushstrokes, more balance between Vincent's lavender and green. 

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The athlete contorts as the stage gets bright, and the guard Fortuno is ringing my cell, repeatedly. I ask Chantal to give me a moment, and here is the guard Fortuno, breathless. "Hey man they've got the big mucks looking for the mystery girl, so you better sneak her out and I'm hanging up because I don't want to be caught helping an assassin and losing my pension, if you get my drift." I understand, I say, and Fortuno says, ask her about the dolphins why don't you.

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I just want to shoot, because I can see what she is giving me, an inner landscape, anxious, to go with this veneer of her outer shell. She is glowing, it seems to me, from the inside out. But what about the dolphins? Oh that, she replies, yes, one less hunter, one less tuna canner, one less bother to the ocean, I couldn't help myself.

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Yes, without weapons. No bow and arrow, no volleyball net, no poison or pills, just her hands. A push, I wonder, or a pull? And what hands, She could sell perfume, or model airplanes, or zircon rings or bracelets for Indian weddings, but instead she defends dolphins.

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What would Vermeer do with a sensor and Photoshop? How far from reality would he be willing to push? To cartoon? Or simply light abstraction limned over the skin of a killer?

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I am amazed at her hands, and how they shape her stance or her bends. She fills the pockets of her curves with fingernail or knuckle, reminds you of the ratios of symmetry and survival. But it's the mind that makes her body willing to be seen, and the mind has its purpose, always.

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Did I think that the first time I saw her shoulders? A swimmer, able to breathe deeply, at the bottom of the sea, where the squares of sunlight do not go. She chases lobster and hammerheads, hides in the currents until dolphins come to play. She is lithe, a putty, shaped into the character you wish to make, and it would be cool to see her in fins, with webs between her toes, gills beside her breasts, and scales that she could shed like confetti in mating season, if fish had mating seasons.

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And we've reached it, with a calm finish, no more room on the card. She will let herself out, she says, and I can go home and avoid the cops looking for her. We shake hands. Thanks for the story, I say, and Thanks for remembering it, says she.

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But as I pack my gear and leave the studio in the basement of the art museum, I glance backward and see the friend of dolphins in a moment of distress. Mystery might be easy to play, but morality is not, and maybe she is an Olympian and will escape the net the authorities throw around the arts to trap her, she will still have her burden of a private violence. Warmed by exposure, she needs to chill back again, to the cool shadows of hiding. I shut the door and lock the studio and in the middle of the night I wake up and wonder if she might still be there the next morning.