Noreen Calloway

Noreen Calloway is 34 and photographs for an agency. Tall and thin, with short, tousled red hair, pale and freckled, she is quick, sarcastic and speaks in images. She trusts no one who doesn't show up on a negative, and carries two film cameras around her neck the way others carry an amulet.

She spends her developing afternoons in a lab in the agency's basement, in a brick warehouse near the port, where the red light never goes out and wire lines crisscross the ceiling full of drying negative strips. She lives in a one-room flat above a bakery, with a mattress on the floor, stacks of magazines and a window through which the smell of bread comes in at four in the morning.

She wears a khaki photographer's vest full of pockets and film rolls, jeans, canvas sneakers and the press badge pinned to the vest. She has a pale face, the gaze of someone who sees the framing before the scene and a dry laugh that cuts the silence. Her chemical-stained fingers give away her trade better than the badge.

About that afternoon, her account is that of full coverage: she says she photographed the whole race, twelve rolls, the Canadian in almost all of them, and that the winner only appears in the last kilometer, as if she had fallen from the sky. Out of habit, at 2:40 p.m. she also photographed the finish table, and says the enlargement tells what the official would rather nobody saw.

When the question suggests she helped the winner cheat in the race, Noreen answers that she had never heard her name until 2:32 p.m. and tells the detective to look for an accomplice elsewhere. She raises one of her cameras, frames his face and fires an empty shutter: the anger of someone accused without a negative or the defense of someone who has already chosen the angle?