Joel Meyerowitz American, b. 6/3/1938

A pane of glass, a chrome mullion, another pane behind it: the picture is built from thresholds, and behind the last one a child is crying. Her mouth is open on a sound the photograph cannot carry, and that missing sound is the wound this image withholds from me even as it hands me everything else — the bangs, the plaid collar, the stalled sedan.

What holds me is not the tantrum but the frame's insistence on distance: Meyerowitz shoots through the glass of his own vehicle to reach hers, so that grief becomes something glimpsed, filtered, almost illicit, the way street life offers up its private crises to any window that happens to be passing.

The adult hand entering from the right, palm open, promises nothing I can name — comfort, reprimand, an apology — and that indecision is my punctum: a stranger's hand suspended between two children's worlds, hers and, briefly, mine, held open across layers of glass I will never see past.