On the 25th of October, 2002, the Lebanese artist Fouad Elkoury wrote an e-mail to a woman he’d never met:

Thursday, 10h30, getting ready to get on the plane (I hate leaving), the concierge puts your letter at the entrance to my room. Thursday, 15h30, once in the air I open the envelope and discover your letter with amazement. Stuck between two other passengers, it’s impossible for me to express my reaction. Friday, 13h30, in Beirut, after having been to the corner barber to get my hair cut to conform with the local style, I respond to you: yes. Fouad.

The author of the letter he’d opened on the plane, in the middle seat, was Isabelle Mège, a medical secretary at the Hospital Saint-Antoine, in the Twelfth Arrondissement of Paris. She had seen Elkoury’s exhibition of black-and-white documentary photographs “Sombres,” from 2002, at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, and in her letter she proposed working with him on the creation of an image in which she would be present. What kind of image would be up to Elkoury. At the time, Mège was thirty-six, and for sixteen years had been contacting photographers whose work she had seen and admired, asking them to incorporate her somehow into their art. She had, by then, a large collection of images by working artists. Not all could be called portraits, and they varied in their style, but they all depicted her body, even if it was a tiny or unrecognizable part of it. In making the first contact with artists, she often used some version of the phrase “J’aimerais m’apercevoir à travers votre regard,” or, “I would like to see myself from your point of view.”

In May of this year, in his living room in the Marais, the same room in which, in 2003, he had taken the photograph of Mège, Elkoury said that he had been surprised I had contacted him with a specific interest in that one image, which he has never exhibited or spoken about. It’s a dramatic, shadowy black-and-white portrait, in which Mège, dressed in black, sits in a chair, staring at the camera above her. He had agreed to her request because, he said, “I could tell this project came from an obsessive mind, this strange project of being photographed by photographers she liked—not those she thought were famous, but those she liked.” When they eventually met, he had been taken aback. “She was very ordinary, a very normal-seeming person. I had thought, based on her letter, that she might be unusual.”

The image by Fouad Elkoury taken at his studio in the Marais, Paris, in 2003. PHOTOGRAPH BY FOUAD ELKOURY

Mège began her project in 1986, when she was twenty years old. She had just moved to Paris from the province of Auvergne, not far from Lyon, where her father was the manager of an automobile-equipment shop and her mother stayed home. When asked about her childhood and adolescence, she uses words like “fine” and “calm” and “French.” At the time she came to Paris, she had never met an artist, and had been to few museum shows, but she collected record covers and postcards of images that appealed to her. One Saturday in mid-July, she went alone to an exhibition by the portrait photographer Jeanloup Sieff at the Musée d’Art Moderne. Stunned by the images, which depicted anonymous and ordinary, as well as famous, subjects, she wrote to Sieff, telling him that she liked his work. To her surprise, he telephoned her a few days later. She wrote in her diary, which she kept from 1986 until 2008, “He calls me, I’m extremely moved, surprised, I feel drunk.” She asked him if he would consider making a picture of her.

After working together at his studio for an hour or so, Sieff announced that there had been no film in the camera—he had been testing her. She was taken aback, but the session had taught her something; she left with the feeling that she had been, up until that point, “without photography, and without a photographic past,” as she wrote in her diary. She began looking at photography books, buying magazines, and keeping track of the names in the exhibitions she visited. Methodically, and recording her activities in brief, elliptical diary entries, she sought out other artists, explaining how she had encountered their work and asking to be used in it. Months later, after seeing her work with other photographers, Sieff asked her back to his studio and finally made an image with her.

By 1990, Mège’s collection had grown to around sixty images—most of them black-and-white, and almost all nude, as she preferred to be photographed. With savings from the secretarial job she found at the hospital, she had travelled to Liège, Amsterdam, Lausanne, Basel, Barcelona, Prague, and Caracas to meet with artists. In Clichés, a photo magazine, she saw images by Joel-Peter Witkin, an American photographer in New Mexico who makes deeply researched and pictorially inflected still-lifes and tableaux of grotesquerie, and who has described his work as something like “the last thing a person sees or remembers before death.” The images that he made around the time Mège discovered his work include a woman posing with a freshly slaughtered horse carcass and a man being fisted up to the bicep by someone just out of the frame. At the Pompidou Centre, she looked for monographs and books of his photographs.

Over several months, Mège wrote three letters to Witkin, first through his Paris gallery, Galerie Baudoin Lebon, and then to him directly. She received no response. For her fourth overture, she changed course, asking a nurse colleague at the hospital to draw some blood from her arm, and to divide it up into three vials. She attached these to a new handwritten note, which she sent in the post to Albuquerque, without telling her colleague what the blood was for or declaring the contents to the postal service.

“There were twenty or forty stamps on the package,” Witkin told me recently. “I wasn’t expecting the blood. But that was a gesture that I understood.” He agreed to meet her two months later, the next time he was in Paris. After meeting at Lebon’s gallery and seeing some of her images, Witkin went away and, as he always does before he shoots, sketched an image: the prototype of what would become one of his best-known works, “Nègre’s Fetishist.” An homage to the earliest photography and to human perversion, the photograph is a direct reference to a negative in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay that Charles Nègre, a painter who became one of the first professional artistic photographers, made of his lover. In Witkin’s image, Mège is lying supine on a daybed that is spattered in a dark substance; it might be ink, or ash, or blood. Her face is turned from the camera, toward what looks like a stove. There is something diabolic in the sooty image; it takes a moment to notice the tiny, fleshlike, pointed polyurethane heels at the end of her tensed feet, which give Mège an otherworldly, succubus-like aspect. Her body looks ordinary, and also possessed; something nightmarish has just happened, or is about to.