A red-haired woman lies back in deep grass on a headland above the sea. She wears a lime-green shirt-dress with green and blue flowers appliquéd across it, one brown sandal on the visible foot, legs bare. The grass is extraordinary — long, fine, combed sideways by the wind into whorls, and green enough to be the loudest thing in the photograph. Beyond and above her a dark cliff falls to a beach, waves come in white, and the far headlands go pale in the haze.
The dress and the grass are the same colour, which is the whole point and also the risk. She is nearly camouflaged; a few more degrees of saturation and she would vanish into the field entirely. What keeps her separate is the hair, the one warm thing in a picture otherwise made of green and grey, placed by the composition at the centre of the right-hand edge, where the eye lands last.
I am aware that I am meant to find this Ophelian, and I do not, quite. Her eyes are open. She is looking straight out, without drama, with something closer to appraisal — a person lying in a field who has noticed she is being photographed. The genre wants a drowned girl and the sitter has declined to supply one, and the picture is better for the refusal. It becomes an image of a woman resting in grass on a cold coast, dressed absurdly and entirely at ease.
A red-haired woman lies back in deep grass on a headland above the sea. She wears a lime-green shirt-dress with green and blue flowers appliquéd across it, one brown sandal on the visible foot, legs bare. The grass is extraordinary — long, fine, combed sideways by the wind into whorls, and green enough to be the loudest thing in the photograph. Beyond and above her a dark cliff falls to a beach, waves come in white, and the far headlands go pale in the haze.
The dress and the grass are the same colour, which is the whole point and also the risk. She is nearly camouflaged; a few more degrees of saturation and she would vanish into the field entirely. What keeps her separate is the hair, the one warm thing in a picture otherwise made of green and grey, placed by the composition at the centre of the right-hand edge, where the eye lands last.
I am aware that I am meant to find this Ophelian, and I do not, quite. Her eyes are open. She is looking straight out, without drama, with something closer to appraisal — a person lying in a field who has noticed she is being photographed. The genre wants a drowned girl and the sitter has declined to supply one, and the picture is better for the refusal. It becomes an image of a woman resting in grass on a cold coast, dressed absurdly and entirely at ease.