Bruce Weber American, b. 29/3/1946

Five women lie on towels, photographed from directly above, so that the picture reads as a single mass of limbs and hair before it resolves into people. Two sleep with their eyes closed at the centre, one with an arm crossed over her chest, one with her hands folded low on her stomach. A fourth curls at the right with her head down; a fifth, at the top, is cropped by the frame to a shoulder and a fall of hair. The towelling is heavy, ridged, and it takes up as much of the picture as they do.

Weber made this on a Santa Monica rooftop in 1985, and the arrangement is doing something more careful than it first appears. Nobody looks up. Not one of the five acknowledges the camera above them, and that refusal is what keeps the picture from tipping into the register it could so easily have occupied. They are together and separately unbothered, which is a difficult thing to stage and a harder thing to fake.

What interests me is who this was made for. In 1985 an image like this went into magazines that sold clothes, and here nobody is wearing any. So the product is the ease itself: bodies at rest in the sun with no one watching, offered to a reader who is, of course, watching. Weber understood that the fantasy being sold was never the garment. It was belonging to the group on the towel.