Txema Yeste Spanish, b. 2/5/1972

A woman fills the frame top to bottom, and almost everything solid about her has gone dark. Her legs and much of her torso read as cut-out shapes; the light comes from behind her, with a flare breaking through at the lower right, and it lands instead on what she wears: a transparent garment with ruffled edges, a ruffled neckline and a row of small round buttons, most of its folds catching the glare. Her hair is thrown up and across her eyes, leaving the nose and the parted lips. Both hands are open with the fingers spread, the one on the right turned full to the camera, as if laid against a pane between her and us.

The ground behind her is the puzzle. It is mottled with pale islands outlined in grey and flecked with points of light, while a broad panel of the garment, lit from behind, swings past her hip in a bright curve edged with ruffles. The ground could be ice, wet glass, a sheet of plastic, the surface of water seen from beneath; the picture gives no horizon and no floor, and nothing tells us whether she stands, lies or floats. The title calls her a silhouette, and the darkest thing in the frame is indeed her body, while what the eye reads most clearly is a garment you can see straight through.

Photography has always promised that a surface is a fact. Here the surface is precisely what cannot be settled, and the image makes no effort to settle it: whether she presses against glass, floats, or lies on a sheet lit from below is left to us, and any answer is our invention, not the camera's testimony. Whatever arrangement of light and material produced it, the photograph hands over the result without the explanation, a record of something that may never have looked like this to anyone standing in the room.