Having spent 30 years behind a camera, Rockford photographer Lynn Sanders knew a prince when she saw one. At a family outing at Medieval Times in 1993, she found herself riveted by a face she knew the camera would love: high cheekbones, straight nose, and strong chin, set off by green eyes and a mass of black hair. When she realized this chiseled head was attached to a great body, Sanders did something she’d never done before: she pressed her card into the palm of jouster Cherif Fortin and gasped, “I’m a photographer. Call me.”
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A few weeks later Fortin, a Stevenson High School graduate (class of ’88), arrived in Sanders’s studio for some preliminary shots. Sanders had made a career of photographing brides and babies, often glazing the prints to give them the look of antique paintings. She had been thinking of moving in another direction when she discovered Fortin and figured she might have stumbled on the new Fabio, then the reigning king of romance-novel covers. Her hunch was confirmed after she set Fortin up as a model for a photographers’ convention. “The room was filled with photographers, about 50 women and 50 guys,” Sanders says. “Cherif was wearing a poet’s shirt.” When he was asked to unbutton it for a pose, revealing well-developed pecs and a chest covered in curly black hair, “the women in the room just sucked the air out of the place. I’m sittin’ in the back thinking, Hmmm. This kid’s got something.” A partnership was born.
The fruit of their effort, Passion’s Blood, made it into bookstores just before Christmas. It’s the story of Prince Emric (Fortin), his betrothed, Lady Leanna (Beth Orbison of Rockford), and their nemesis, Emric’s evil brother. It has 34 color illustrations, mostly of Fortin looking brave and sultry and spilling blood. There’s plenty of chest hair and nipples (his), but the pictures are basically PG. Spicy passages in the text were inserted at the request of Genesis. “We were very pristine at first,” Fortin says.
