He stood before the entire class, my tired, unwilling face projected on the screen behind him, and had the nerve to call me his muse.
It all started with a community college photography class, my one escape from the daily grind.
A classmate named Arthur decided I wasn’t a person learning a new skill, but a subject for his “art.” First came the pictures posted online without my permission, then the constant feeling of his lens following me. His little project grew into a full-blown obsession, a portfolio of my stolen moments he proudly called his “Sarah Series.”
I told him to stop. I told the instructor. Nothing worked. My discomfort was dismissed as a compliment I just didn’t understand.
He thought his art gave him the last word, but he never imagined I would use the very language of photography to publicly dismantle his masterpiece, one technical failure at a time.
The First Shutter Click: A Hobby in Halogen Light
I signed up for “Introduction to Black and White Photography” for the same reason most middle-aged women sign up for community college classes: to have a single activity that didn’t involve my job, my husband, or my teenage son. My role as a UX designer was all about clean lines and digital precision. I craved the mess of it—the chemical smells, the tangible weight of a roll of film, the magic of an image slowly emerging in a tray of developer.
The classroom smelled of dust and fixer, a scent I found immediately comforting. It was a basement room filled with mismatched stools, scarred wooden tables, and an assortment of students. There were eager high schoolers, a few retired men with intimidatingly expensive gear, and then there was him.
He had a cheap Canon Rebel that looked like it had been through a war, its plastic body scuffed and worn. He introduced himself to the class as Arthur. He had thinning hair, a perpetually earnest expression, and a way of speaking in soft, declarative sentences as if he were sharing profound truths. His theme for the semester, he announced, was “finding the sublime in the mundane.”
I barely registered him beyond that first night. He was just another piece of the classroom furniture until my photo appeared on the class forum. It was a shot of me from behind, leaning over a light table, my silhouette framed by the glowing surface. The caption read: “Light finds its subject. Week 1.”
My husband, Mark, glanced at my laptop screen over dinner. “Huh. A little creepy,” he said, before returning to his steak. “At least it’s a good photo.”
It wasn’t a good photo. The focus was soft and the composition was lazy. But Mark was right about the other part. It was a little creepy. I brushed it off as a one-time thing, an awkward attempt at his “sublime in the mundane” project. I was just a convenient piece of the mundane that happened to be in his line of sight.
Pixels and Public Space
A week later, a second photo appeared. This time it was a profile shot of me listening to our instructor, Ms. Albright, talk about F-stops. My brow was furrowed in concentration. The caption was more direct: “Beauty in everyday light.”
This one felt different. It wasn’t a silhouette; it was my face. Unposed, unaware. A few other students had ‘liked’ the post. A knot of irritation tightened in my stomach. I was here to learn how to take pictures, not to be the subject of someone else’s homework.
I scrolled through the forum. Arthur had posted photos of other things—a crack in the pavement, a water-stained ceiling tile, a half-empty coffee cup. But I was the only person he’d posted. Twice.
“He posted another one,” I told Mark that night as we cleaned up the kitchen.
“The photo guy?” He rinsed a plate, his back to me. “Just tell him to knock it off if it bothers you.”
It was practical advice, the kind Mark was good at. But it ignored the sticky, complicated reality of the situation. I didn’t want a confrontation. I didn’t want to be the difficult woman who couldn’t take a compliment, even if the compliment felt like a violation. Voicing my discomfort felt like admitting weakness, like I couldn’t handle something as trivial as a weird classmate. So I said nothing.
The Rule of Thirds and Unspoken Rules
The next Tuesday, I felt his eyes on me. It was a distinct, prickly sensation on the back of my neck. I tried to ignore it, focusing on loading film into my camera body, the cool metal a welcome distraction. But then I heard it—the soft, plastic *click-whirr* of his DSLR.
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