Sarah Moon French, b. 1941

Almost nothing here behaves like a photograph. A woman sits turned away, head bowed, eyes closed, and every edge of her has been allowed to melt into the green behind. The dress is green. The wall is green. The shadow under her arm is green. One thing in the whole frame is not, and it is her mouth: a dark red, painted, exact, the only object in the picture with a hard outline. Her hands are down at the lower left, one of them just visible, the fingers slack.

The image wants to be taken for a painting and very nearly gets away with it. The surface has the bloom of pastel worked into rough paper. The drapery falls the way drapery falls in a museum, in long soft folds that were composed rather than caught. Somebody coming to it cold would place it around 1900 and would not think to ask what camera made it. The confusion is deliberate, and a newspaper paid for it.

There is something bracing about a photograph this willing to lie about its own nature. It was made in 1994, on assignment, and it dresses itself as a reverie from a hundred years earlier. The lipstick gives the game away. It is the one mark in the frame that looks applied rather than remembered, the single place where the picture admits it was made now, by a machine, with a living woman sitting very still in front of it.