Joel Meyerowitz American, b. 6/3/1938

Two horses have been loaded into a trailer, and all we see of them is what they present to the traffic behind: two glossy chestnut rumps above the tailgate and two tails hanging down the painted doors, one black, one a rusty red. The trailer is a deep teal, trimmed with white pinstripes and studded with red reflectors, and its California plate reads DF 7380. Around it the street goes on selling itself: a Mobil sign, shakes and sundaes, Blue Chip Stamps, a car wash and lube for $3.49, and a poster with a grinning cartoon tiger that promises to put a tiger in your tank.

It is a joke, obviously, and a good one, because the picture tells it deadpan. The two tails hang like a pair of curtains, perfectly symmetrical except for their colour, and the whole commercial landscape of the street, with its tigers and stamps and bargains, is pushed out to the sides to make room for the least commercial thing in the frame. Power, the signs keep promising. Here is horsepower, the original article, facing the wrong way.

And then there is the shadow. Low on the trailer doors, between the tail lights, the photographer's head and shoulders fall across the paint, as solid as any of the signs. Once you notice it you cannot stop noticing: it is the only thing in the picture that belongs to our side of it, the evidence that someone stood on this spot in the low sun and found the view funny. It is the kind of accident most photographers would crop out. Meyerowitz leaves his in, a signature written in the only ink the light provides.