She had me lean on a gray pedestal before a gray drop cloth. Lower my head, look away from the camera, look back again, lay one hand on the other. None of this came naturally, but as Sigrid kept giving instructions, asking about my book, telling me about her parents, I began to worry less about the position of my hands. She took a few Polaroid snapshots, and we went over to her work table and waited for them to develop.

On the wall were dozens of her pictures. Jamaica Kincaid, long legs wrapped around a chair back. Robert Pinsky, poet laureate, whose mobile face never rested in one expression for more than a 60th of a second. Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Prize winner, sitting in profile and looking regally irritated.

In general, according to Sigrid, the better known the writer, the less pleasant the session. "You will come back in a couple of years and not be so nice," she told me. Authors, unused to taking instruction and holding still, were not easy subjects, but Sigrid found them more interesting than the fashion models she used to shoot when she first came to New York from Berlin. She had a number of her subjects' books on her shelves. One of them had inscribed his: "To Sigrid, who made me look good."

She ripped the backing off the first Polaroid.

When you receive the first copy of a book you've written, there's a gratifying shock of recognition at seeing your private thoughts made into a 6-by-9-inch object. You know the work to be yours, yet its reification has a magical property that gives it an existence in the world apart from you. Sigrid's Polaroid gave me a different kind of shock, for it had much less to do with me. The face emerging out of blackness hadn't gotten a bad night's sleep. It wasn't hyperaware of the angle of the head. The white light articulated a bone structure that my face doesn't have. The clasped hands were veinier, stronger. The expression was cool, steady -- tough!

My prose style was riveted into place, my career was poking along at 20 mph, but Sigrid Estrada had made me into someone else. This was how it was done.

"You're a genius," I told her.

We went back to the set newly energized and Sigrid took more pictures. Roll after roll, black and white and color, red and green light, head shots, left angle, right angle, straight on, different shirt, different stance, different mood. For almost three hours Sigrid Estrada got on and off her stepladder and took pictures, and the whole time she was keeping me engaged. "No, too serious. Look away and back. Not straight on, your nose isn't right. Ah, you blinked. Yes, that's good! Sort of Yves Montand. Sort of a French rock star nose. The smile doesn't look like you mean it. Think of something nice. Yes, like that! That haunted look!"

"Let's try for Matt Damon," Sigrid finally suggested. Damon was on the cover of that week's New York Times Magazine. In an earlier life I had built kitchen shelves for his mother. A boyish blond teenager sat on the counter while I worked, idly picking up my tools to play air drums while making percussive hip-hop noises with his mouth. Now, age 39, I obediently put on a black sweater under my jacket and tried for Matt Damon. Sigrid liked it.

At some point during the session I realized that no one had ever paid such sustained and intense attention to me in my life. It was exhilarating and exhausting.

Sigrid had discovered early in her career that having feelings for the subject could compromise the work. A good picture required emotional detachment. Yet it also seemed that in order for the project -- my transformation by her camera -- to succeed, we both had to heighten the atmosphere, to create an artificial excitement. She had to iron my shirts. I had to try for Matt Damon. The session in her studio apartment, a few hours together in the middle of the day, the city 16 floors below forgotten, the ending inevitable and coming soon, had to acquire the self-deceiving mood of a tryst.

When it was over, I packed up my clothes and Sigrid walked me to her door.

"It's sad, this job," she said. "We become friends for a few hours and then I never hear from them again."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

A few weeks later an envelope arrived from my publisher. It contained two color prints and a note asking which one I preferred.

I stared at the pictures in bewilderment. Something had gone wrong. There was no Yves Montand nose, no haunted look. My eyes were red-rimmed. I looked as though I hadn't slept well and was doing my best to smile. What had happened to all those great pictures Sigrid had taken? Technically these color photos were fine, but I had mysteriously, unmistakably, become myself again.

I wrote an urgent e-mail to the publicist. "The B&W Polaroids Sigrid showed me looked better."

Half an hour later the reply came flying back. "These are the best photos of the lot," it said. "The black and white shots were completely inappropriate for our purposes -- you look like a leather-clad biker guy who might have written a badass on-the-road type drug-sodden memoir." I was "a writer of serious nonfiction," and the book needed a suitable jacket photo.

I called the editor.

"The others made you look like a rock star," he explained.

Embarrassed and more disappointed than I could understand, I tried for a tone of knowing self-mockery. "And what's wrong with that?"

He laughed. "You're not a rock star."

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