Pancho Saula Spanish, b. 3/10/1972

Shot from low and into the light, so that the man is only a silhouette: a shoulder, an arm, a hand, the rest cut away by the top of the frame. Out of his hands the net falls. It comes down and to the left in a long white cascade, backlit until the mesh glows, spreading across the whole lower half of the picture and out past the edge. Behind it the sea is dark and the sky is a flat pale nothing. At the upper left of the mass sits a knot of black floats and looping cord.

It is a wedding dress, obviously, and the title is not pretending otherwise. The net has the fall of tulle, the volume of a train, the way real couture sits when it has been dropped rather than arranged. Photographers have been putting women in white against the sea for a hundred years. Here the fabric is fishing gear, the wearer is a working man, and nobody placed anything anywhere. He lifted a net and the light did the rest.

The floats are what make it stick. Dark corks strung on tangled line, bunched exactly where a bouquet would be carried, black flowers on knotted stems. They are the least bridal objects on that boat and they have landed in the one position that makes the whole thing work. Half a step to either side and Saula would have lost it. The picture comes out of the encounter with a completely straight face, which is the only way this sort of resemblance survives being pointed at.