Txema Yeste Spanish, b. 2/5/1972

There is no ground in this photograph. A woman hangs in a pale curdled sky with her arms flung wide and her palms open, seen from directly beneath, so that the first thing you meet is the soles of her bare feet, pressed together and turned toward you. She wears a dark seamed bodysuit and a heavy sculptural necklace at the throat. Around her, a dozen lumps of volcanic rock hang in the air at various distances, quite still, as though somebody had switched gravity off between exposures.

Nobody believes this for a second and the picture is not asking anybody to. The stones are spread too evenly. The sky has been left blank so that nothing can give a scale. Photography spent its first century being trusted precisely because it could not invent, and here is an image inventing in the open, with no horizon anywhere in it to argue against, daring you to enjoy it regardless.

What the fiction cannot fake is the feet. Everything else is performing. The arms have been placed, the face is composed, the necklace catches light where it was meant to catch it. The soles are only skin, the part of a body that spends its whole life on the ground and has no idea how to pose. In a picture with no ground in it anywhere, they are also the one reminder that there is supposed to be one. It is called Full circle and it was made on a volcanic island, which is where the stones came from and, presumably, where they went back.