A woman in profile, chin raised, eyes closed, against a ground of unbroken coral. Her hair is braided flat to the skull and falls in a single plait over the shoulder. Across her temple and cheek someone has laid a tangle of cord — red and gold, twisted, tipped like the arms of an octopus or a knot of small snakes — and it rests on her face without being fastened to anything. The bodice is a poured blue, vinyl or lacquer, catching a cold highlight where the rest of the picture is warm.
The title is a number, 1176, which is what a file is called before anyone has decided what it is of. That is closer to the truth of the thing than a name would be. What we are looking at is a colour transaction: a hot ground, a cold garment, and a skin obliged to negotiate between them, lit so that the red bleeds along the jaw and the shoulder before the blue takes over. The cord on the face is a shape rather than a symbol — attach a myth to it, Medusa or otherwise, and the picture becomes smaller than it is.
The colour is also where photography's own history shows through. This warmth was manufactured; no coast in the world hands you a coral of that evenness, and the picture belongs to a lineage of studio work in which the light is built rather than found. A print of it is a sheet of paper carrying pigment, and its coral will drift with the paper and with the wall it hangs on. The file called 1176 will not. Of the two objects, only the print is subject to time, which makes it the older and stranger one.
A woman in profile, chin raised, eyes closed, against a ground of unbroken coral. Her hair is braided flat to the skull and falls in a single plait over the shoulder. Across her temple and cheek someone has laid a tangle of cord — red and gold, twisted, tipped like the arms of an octopus or a knot of small snakes — and it rests on her face without being fastened to anything. The bodice is a poured blue, vinyl or lacquer, catching a cold highlight where the rest of the picture is warm.
The title is a number, 1176, which is what a file is called before anyone has decided what it is of. That is closer to the truth of the thing than a name would be. What we are looking at is a colour transaction: a hot ground, a cold garment, and a skin obliged to negotiate between them, lit so that the red bleeds along the jaw and the shoulder before the blue takes over. The cord on the face is a shape rather than a symbol — attach a myth to it, Medusa or otherwise, and the picture becomes smaller than it is.
The colour is also where photography's own history shows through. This warmth was manufactured; no coast in the world hands you a coral of that evenness, and the picture belongs to a lineage of studio work in which the light is built rather than found. A print of it is a sheet of paper carrying pigment, and its coral will drift with the paper and with the wall it hangs on. The file called 1176 will not. Of the two objects, only the print is subject to time, which makes it the older and stranger one.