Sarah Moon French, b. 1941

Two legs in stockings, cropped at the top of the thigh and again below the knee at the shoe, stand against a backdrop of blue and yellow checks that runs behind and beneath them in two different scales. The stocking tops are a deep red band; below them the mesh softens the skin to green. One foot turns inward. Everything is out of focus and dense with grain, and the image again sits inside the pale ragged border of the film.

This is a fashion photograph that has decided not to describe the product. The stockings are unreadable as merchandise; you could not tell the denier, the finish, the brand. What the picture describes instead is a condition of looking, in which colour arrives before form and the eye keeps failing to sharpen. Moon made it in 1997, deep into a career spent undoing the clarity her industry was built on.

Painting got there first, of course, and photography has spent a century being anxious about it. What is unusual here is that the softness is not nostalgia for painting; it comes from the film, the lens and the exposure, and it could not be produced by hand. This is a specifically photographic blur, and it is doing what only photographs do: standing at the precise distance where a body becomes a pattern.