Joel Meyerowitz American, b. 1938

How long does it take a colour to settle? The pink that washes the round lifeguard tower at Miami Beach, the same pink that flushes the underside of the clouds, did not arrive all at once. It accumulated, the way dusk accumulates, until the whole surface of the picture seems to have absorbed a single tint and held it. Meyerowitz photographs that holding. The pool lies flat and green-grey, the brick coping curls toward us in a slow S, and the air has gone the particular violet of a Florida evening that is neither day nor night but the long hinge between them.

Nothing in the frame is in a hurry, and yet the palms tell us the exposure was not instantaneous. Their fronds have blurred into soft grey plumes against the lilac sky, recording a wind we cannot otherwise see, while the tower, the empty deck chairs, the diving board and the painted number 3 on the pool's lip stay perfectly still. This is the patience of the large camera: it lets the world arrange itself, lets the breeze write itself into the leaves, and asks the photographer only to wait for the light to be exactly this and no other. The picture is less an event than a duration made visible.

What lingers is the emptiness. The lounge chairs are vacant, the tower deserted, the pool unbroken by any swimmer; the human day has withdrawn and left its furniture behind. Yet the place is not melancholy. Bathed in that even, theatrical rose, the modest resort architecture acquires a quiet dignity, as if the light were doing the looking for us. Meyerowitz finds in this lull the moment when an ordinary American leisure ground becomes, briefly, a stage set lit for a play that no one will perform.