Txema Yeste Spanish, b. 2/5/1972

She stands at the prow of a boat passing beneath a Paris bridge, in profile, a green gown breaking into ruffles that pour down to the deck and almost into the water. The stone pier beside her carries its carved corbels and garlands with the mild indifference of a monument that has outlasted several centuries of fashion; she does not look at it. Her gaze goes forward, along the river, toward the dome of the Institut de France sitting low under a grey sky, autumn trees still holding their colour along the far bank.

What interests me is the arrangement of who looks at what. The building has been looked at for four hundred years; she is dressed to be looked at for the length of a magazine's shelf life. Yet the photograph gives her the more commanding position — upright, moving, unbothered by the stone's claim to permanence — while the palace recedes into background, a fact of geography rather than the subject of the picture. It is a small reversal, and Yeste plays it straight, without irony.

I think about how rarely a Black woman is photographed in Paris as someone simply passing through its monuments rather than visiting them, explaining them, or standing apart from them. Here she occupies the river the way a Parisian occupies it, which is to say without comment, gown and current moving together, the Seine doing what it has always done beneath the weight of whoever happens to be crossing it that day.