The single best portrait ever to be taken

"We make ourselves believe we want to become the artist behind that camera, but in the end, we'd secretly love to be the ones in that picture, frozen in time for generations to come and look at us and wonder, not about the finger that clicked off a machine that fraction of a second, but about the eyes that will be staring back at them for all eternity", the famed photographer Colin Shashin was confessing to me.

He had spent his whole life convinced its main purpose was to find that caption that would make it and go down in history as the single best portrait ever to be taken.

I agreed to a session with him, his first in front of the camera. And it would be with me, an unknown begginer, a complete nobody, unpublished and inexperienced, behind it. His words, not mine. Exactly why he chose me, he told me.

And that's the whole story of the so-called enigmatic Monkey Lank. All there is to it from the artist's point of view, anyway.

It was me that snapped the shot, but the picture will be his forever.