Cig Harvey British, b. 1973

Rhododendrons in flower, dense to every edge of the frame. The right two thirds are pale violet, truss after truss of them. The left third goes dark and wine-red, and the leaves between are almost black. At the lower left, upside down, a girl's face: chin uppermost, forehead lowest, dark hair spread back into the leaves, a small gold hoop in one ear. Her eyes are open.

That is the whole difference. There is a very old picture of a girl lying among flowers, and in that picture her eyes are always shut and the flowers are always a little bit about death. Here she is awake and she is looking, and the look is level and unbothered, aimed somewhere past the top of the frame at a sky we are not shown. She has not been arranged into anything. She is lying down in a garden with her eyes open, which is a thing children do.

The inversion is what keeps you there. Everything else in the picture hangs downward under its own weight, the way flowers hang, and she alone runs the other way. It takes a second to find her and then you cannot stop finding her. The bush is the subject and she is the small pale accident at the corner of it, except that she is plainly not an accident, and somebody who loves her put her there and then stood back far enough to let the rhododendrons win.