Bruce Weber American, b. 29/3/1946

She leans back against a white square column that has been wrapped at two heights with heavy nautical rope. Her hair is wet and pushed back, hanging in ropes of its own. She has pulled the striped bikini top down and holds it, along with its strap, in both fists at her chest, and her crossed forearms finish the job the fabric started. A thin bracelet sits on one wrist. Behind her, a wall of rough coral stone in hard Florida sun. She is looking straight down the lens with her lips a little apart.

The picture promises something and then declines to hand it over, which is the oldest arrangement in the medium and still works. The eye goes looking. It gets as far as the bunched fabric and the forearms and has to stop, and on the way back it lands on the bracelet, which is a completely ordinary object doing nothing except being there on the arm that is covering everything up.

What makes it hold is that she is running it. The undressing has been arrested by her own hands, at a moment she chose, and the look she is giving the camera has no invitation in it whatever. Weber has photographed a very famous face in bright sunlight against a wall, given her a rope-bound column to lean on, and then let her decide where the picture stops. It stops exactly where she says.