Cig Harvey British, b. 1973

Seen from directly above: black water, and floating on it dense olive-gold clumps of kelp and rockweed, so thick across the top of the frame that the water barely shows. Then, in the lower middle, a body. Pale legs, a bare foot, a dark swimsuit, shoulders just under the surface, a trail of small bubbles going up. She is swimming face down, beneath the weed, and she is very nearly the same value as the water she is in.

It takes a moment to find her, and the delay is the design. The seaweed has the top of the picture, it is the brightest thing in it, and it is what the title names first. The person is the last thing you see. Harvey has photographed a swimmer as an event in a field of algae rather than as a subject with algae behind her.

The colour of that water says everything about its temperature. This is Maine, the weed is winter weed, and nobody is in a sea that colour without having decided to be. What the photograph holds is the second in which a body has gone under and is still going down, hair back, arms at the sides, bubbles rising, entirely committed to it. Elizabeth is in the title. She is also, briefly, the least visible thing in her own portrait.