Bruce Weber American, b. 29/3/1946

The face arrives upside down: mouth above, eyes below, the brow at the bottom edge and the wet hair rising in dark points along the top. He is at the surface of the pond, or just beneath it, eyes closed, water lying in a film across one cheek and beading along the ridge of the nose. Pale filaments cross the whole picture in long diagonals, light on the water, weed, the surface's own drawing, and they float over the face as though scratched into it.

Nothing here is a likeness in the ordinary sense. Turned the right way up he would be a young man swimming; inverted and pressed against the water's skin, he becomes what the exposure actually recorded, which is not a person but a configuration of light that lasted a fraction of a second and was then fixed in silver. The pond kept nothing. The negative kept everything: each bead, each filament, the closed lashes, the small bright point on the lip.

This is the strangeness at the centre of the medium, and pictures like this one make it visible by removing the props of recognition, the horizon, the right way up, the open eyes. What is left is the trace: one body's contact with light and water on an afternoon in the Adirondacks in 1989, still perfectly legible now, long after that water has been through the sky and back a thousand times.