quinlan raleigh | capitol

They picked him out off the street when he was thirteen. He'd been standing in front of a coffee shop beside his mother as she'd been talking her friend's ear off. They said they liked the way he wore his jacket- half off a shoulder, weird thing to notice.

His mother had been delighted the first time they walked into a store and saw his face on the cover of a magazine but he'd just felt outside himself. He didn't like the way that the camera blinked at him, so cold it made his skin crawl.

It was fine for a while, not for him, but just fine. They let him keep clothing sometimes, Bizou called him her muse and everyone was wearing her line. He booked so many shoots, so many catwalks that eventually he was pulled from school and he worked full time.

There were parties, endless things he had to attend just to look pretty on someone's arm. It was just a status thing in the end, he was a prize to be won, the fashion scene's jewel.

Just a few years because they cycle through models so quickly. Quin had seen it, met others only a year older than him who had to fight for jobs. But he couldn't do that, couldn't risk becoming a background piece, not with hospital bills to pay and a mother with an ailing mind.

So he put up with all of it, camera lenses that crept too close and hands that knew every bit of his skin better than he did. Even the brightest lights, the warmest scenes have an underbelly and Quin learned how to scratch them over time.

The first time he found himself on the other side of the camera, he was nineteen and his mother lay dying on the living room couch. She smiled shyly at him, crows-feet appearing like magic. "I'm afraid I'm not very pretty," she'd said and gripped the blanket nervously, "Just wait for my son, he's an angel."

It was the first time he realized how comforting it was to hold the weight of the lense in his hands, warmed by the afternoon sun filtering in through the window.

Quinlan Raleigh
twenty-four
photographer