Txema Yeste Spanish, b. 2/5/1972

Photographed from directly overhead: a woman lying on white sand, arms out from her sides, palms down, feet together. Her forearms, hands and shins are crusted with dry sand. She is looking straight up into the lens with her eyes open. Shells have been laid across her — a scallop at the sternum, a whelk at the throat, a spray of coral between the breasts, round pale shells and cowries scattered down the torso, the arms, the thighs, the shins. She wears an olive crochet bikini whose tasselled ties have been flung out to either side.

The pose belongs to an effigy and the sand is the colour of chalk, so the first reading is funerary: a body laid out, decorated, seen from above. The eyes undo it immediately. She is not resting and she is not pretending to be dead. She is lying still while somebody arranges shells on her, and she is watching him do it.

There are footprints in the sand around her and the photograph has not cropped them out. Somebody walked round this body several times, placing things. What the picture is finally about is the patience: twenty minutes of a hot afternoon in which a person agreed to lie on a beach and not move while an image was assembled on top of her, and looked up the entire time.