Joel Meyerowitz American, b. 6/3/1938

A tall jug stands alone on a scarred table against an ochre wall. Its body is a deep russet, wood or painted tin, the grain showing through where the surface has worn away; the handle is another thing entirely, crusted white, as though it had been dipped in plaster and left to dry. The wall behind carries drips, pencil marks and small blue-grey blots. The tabletop is covered in loops of graphite where a hand went round and round the same objects.

These are the actual objects from Giorgio Morandi's studio, photographed where they stood. The proposition is a contemporary one and slightly vertiginous: a photograph of the specific, humble, physical things that generated a lifetime of paintings which were themselves famously not about things. Meyerowitz is not illustrating the pictures. He is photographing their raw material with the patience the painter spent on it.

What makes it hold as a work rather than a document is the pencil. Those looping lines are the painter's own, drawn around his arrangements so that they could be put back exactly, and they turn the table into a record of decisions. The object sits inside the ghost of its own placement — which is as good an account of the relation between a photograph and its subject as anyone is likely to get into a single frame.