Read Chapter 20: A Price for a Photograph

The phone on the wall of the squat rang at seven in the morning, a raw, insistent shriek that cut through the thin sleep I’d managed after the drive back from the show. I was on the mattress in the corner, still in my jeans, a cold dread curling in my stomach before my eyes were even open. Only a handful of people had this number. Robbie. The magazine. Or Dex.

I stumbled across the bare floorboards and snatched the receiver. “Yeah?”

“Mara.” Dex’s voice, slick and clipped. Two syllables that turned the morning grey. “I heard about your little stumble last night. A shame about the camera. But I’ve got news that might cheer you up.”

“Dex, it’s seven in the morning. What do you want?”

“Business, love. The kind you should be thanking me for. Those early prints you shot of The Unknowns, the ones from the Brixton gigs and that first studio session before you got all famous?” He paused, letting it hang. “Sold them. A private collector in Mayfair. Paid a stupid amount of money for them, too. Consider it my gift.”

My chest tightened. “You did *what*?”

“Sold them. You know, the ones you left in the contact sheets at the label office. The legal ones, outtakes, nothing you ever used for the magazine. I’ve got a man who handles that sort of thing. He moved them in a week.”

“You had no right.” My voice came out low, the kind of calm I saved for the moment before I shoved someone. “Those were mine. My work. My negatives.”

“Your negatives?” He laughed, a dry, patronizing sound. “Check your contract, love. When you signed on as band photographer, the label got a claim to anything shot on their time. You were on their clock for those. I just found a buyer. That’s not theft, that’s commerce.”

I gripped the receiver hard enough that the plastic creaked. “I never signed a contract for the band. I shot those because I wanted to. Because I was *there*. That’s my work, Dex. My eye. You don’t get to sell that out from under me.”

“Then take it up with legal,” he said, breezy as ever. “Mercury’s got a whole floor of them. But I’d check your signature first. Ask them about clause fourteen.”

The line went dead.

I stood there in the cold light of the squat, my heart knocking against my ribs. Clause fourteen. I remembered the stack of papers I’d signed in a daze two years ago when The Unknowns had first picked me up, still buzzing from a pub show, eager to be taken seriously. A single A4 form, mostly boilerplate, with a rights section I’d skimmed because the singer was shouting another round and Robbie was watching me from across the table. I’d wanted to impress them. I’d signed fast.

An hour later, I was clean and dressed, my cracked Leica in a bag over my shoulder as I stood in the Mercury Records reception. The woman at the desk buzzed me through to the legal corridor before I had to ask twice. Word travels fast when you start making the label real money.

The lawyer’s name was Mrs. Albright, a thin woman in a grey suit with reading glasses perched on a sharp nose. She didn’t offer me a seat, just waved at the chair opposite her desk and pushed a single photocopied page across the polished surface.

“I anticipated you’d be in,” she said, voice flat. “Mr. Reeves called ahead.”

“Then you know why I’m here.”

“You’re here because you believe you have a claim to photographs sold without your permission.” She tapped the page. “Clause fourteen. ‘The photographer acknowledges that any work produced during the course of an engagement with the artist or the label, including but not limited to rehearsals, performances, studio sessions, and promotional activities, shall be considered work-for-hire, with all rights, reproduction, and resale interests held by Mercury Records and its assigns.’”

My eyes scanned the words but I’d stopped reading at “work-for-hire.” “I wasn’t engaged by the label. I was engaged by the band.”

“You were paid by the band out of advances secured by the label. That makes you a contractor of the label’s subsidiary relationship.” She removed her glasses and set them down, folding her hands. “You’re a clever girl, Miss Ellis. You’re doing well in the magazines. But you signed this before you knew what you were worth, and now you’re learning what that costs.”

“That’s not fair.”

“It’s not about fair.” She slid a second page toward me. “This is the inventory of what Mr. Reeves’s collector purchased. Eighteen prints, all from your first six months with the band, all shot on label-sanctioned time. You’ll notice we’ve accounted for them properly. The label takes its commission. The remainder has been deposited into the account on file for you.”

I looked at the figure at the bottom. It was real money—more than I’d made selling the mid-leap shot to the magazine. More than enough to cover my debt to Robbie and a new camera besides. But it didn’t feel like payment. It felt like the price of my blindness. Eighteen moments I’d chosen, framed, waited for. Eighteen pieces of how I saw the world, handed over to a stranger in Mayfair who would hang them in a hallway and never know the name of the night I shot them.

My hands were shaking. “I want to renegotiate. I want my work back.”

“That’s not what clause fourteen offers.” Mrs. Albright’s tone softened a fraction. “But it does offer you leverage. You’ve got a name now. The magazine sold well. You get representation, a proper lawyer of your own, and you can argue future work is outside the scope. But the prints already sold? They’re gone. The collector won’t return them, and the label won’t claw back a sale.”

I stood up, my chair scraping hard against the floor. “Then I’ll shoot better work. Work they can’t claim. Work they’ll have to beg me for.”

Her eyebrows rose, almost impressed. “I’d expect nothing less from someone who writes clause fourteen into their own next contract.”

I was out the door and halfway down the corridor before I heard the phone start to ring again. I didn’t turn back. I knew who it was—Dex, probably, eager to tell me how generous he’d been, or a magazine editor chasing another print, or Robbie, who I hadn’t told yet about any of this, who was probably still asleep in a bus on the way back from the show, dreaming about daughter and fire escapes and all the things he only gave me in the dark.

I checked my watch. We were meant to meet at the darkroom at nine. Lenny’s film was waiting. And now, so was the paper trail of every image I’d ever made under the band’s name.

I walked to the Tube, the cracked weight of my Leica heavy in the bag. Every click of the turnstile felt like a countdown. I was going to develop Lenny’s film. I was going to find out what had been waiting in that canister all these weeks. And I was going to make a decision about what I let anyone claim of me again.

The first train was late, and the platform was cold, and I stood at its edge with my hands clenched in my pockets, thinking about all the pictures I’d already lost and the ones I hadn’t taken yet.