Joel Meyerowitz American, b. 6/3/1938

A man in a dark jacket and trousers, barefoot, tumbles head over heels into the swimming pool of a ship, caught upside down in a tight tuck a hand's breadth above the turquoise water, the soles of his feet turned to the clouds. Behind him a steel slide and a blue-painted ladder rise against an overcast sky, and a jet of water spills from an outlet in the pool wall. At the netted rail on the left, four men watch: one in dark glasses, one in a green sweater grinning with his arms folded on the rail, a man laughing beside him, and a young officer in a white jacket with shoulder boards. A little apart stands an old man in a flat cap and a grey suit. Beyond them the sea runs grey-blue to the horizon.

The watchers tell us what kind of event this is. They lean on the rail as men lean on the barrier at a match, easy, amused, sure of a good result. The man in the pool has given up everything for their entertainment: his dignity, his dry clothes, the upright bearing that a jacket is meant to guarantee.

This is the theatre men make for one another. What he offers them is his own ridiculousness, the body folded like a child's, the face upside down, and they receive it with the particular pleasure of men watching one of their own stop being serious. The young officer in white is the only one who looks as if he has not quite decided whether to laugh; his uniform has told him who he is, and it is not the man in the water. I like the old man best. He stands apart, a hand on the rail, and looks as if he has seen it all before.