A first session is an audition that runs both ways. The actor is checking whether you can see them; you are checking whether they'll let you. It's the second session that means something — nobody comes back to a photographer out of politeness.
Catalin-Vasile Rusti came back.
He was born in Rădăuți, in northern Romania, and built his career in London the unglamorous way — screen work, short films, a face slowly becoming known. He appears in Last Night in Soho (2021), and in 2024 took the role of Jozef in the independent feature The Ceremony. Between the two sittings his career moved visibly forward, which is exactly what the second session was for: the pictures have to keep up with the man.
The room
Some sessions stay transactions. Ours didn't. By the second sitting it was simply two people who work well in the same room — which is about as close to friendship as a studio gets. Maybe it's the shared corner of an old map: I was born in a country that no longer exists, he comes from Romania, and the two accents understand each other's distances. Whatever it is, it shows up in the frames — there's no wall between him and the lens, because there was none between him and me.
The range
Four looks, one afternoon. Olive knit against gold plaster, hand behind his head — the charm frame, easy and open. Black on black, eyes level — the one that gives nothing away until a director asks it to. A mustard jumper on white for the warmth, the boy-next-door who might not be. And a full-length on grey, because his physicality is part of the instrument and casting should see all of it.
The drive
What I remember most isn't a frame. It's the seriousness underneath the ease — a man who treats a headshot session the way working actors treat everything: as a rung. He arrived knowing what the pictures were for and left already climbing toward the next thing. Some sitters you photograph and wonder. This one I'd put money on.
A session built to keep pace with a moving career is what the Director's Session is for.
Photographed at my studio in Seven Sisters, North London.