Sarah Moon French, b. 1941

Two thirds of this picture is a pond seen from so high and so steeply that the water stands up like a wall. Lily pads cover it, hundreds of them, each catching a little light along its rim. The bottom third is bank: reeds, coarse grass, a tangle of stems going every way. Lying in that tangle is a woman. One knee is raised and the boot on that foot points at the sky. Patterned fabric, a dress or a stocking, twists round the leg and gathers under the knee. A hat lies at the lower left, where it fell.

The photograph declines to say what has happened. Her face is outside the frame. The body is dark against darker ground and could be resting, or sleeping, or something a good deal worse, and nothing in the picture will settle the question. Sarah Moon arranged the evidence and withheld the verdict. So the boot has to carry it. Upright, absurd, entirely specific, it is the one hard object in a field of soft ones, and the eye keeps going back to it because it is the only thing here with a clear edge.

Pictures like this usually come with a caption that closes them. This one is called 18 juillet. A date, and nothing else, and the date explains none of it. The photograph is content to be a description of reeds, water, leaves, a woman and a boot. It describes them very well and refuses to add them up. That refusal is the work. Whatever anyone might want to know is just outside the edge, and Moon made sure the edge falls exactly where it does.