Femme, on the Rocks

Femme was made in a single afternoon on the rocks south of the island, on 35mm, with nothing but the light that was already there. Twenty-seven frames sit in the gallery. There were not a great many more than that to begin with.

The brief, such as it was, ran to one line: stance and stillness, against granite, before the tide came in. I have learned to be suspicious of briefs longer than that. A long brief is usually a way of deciding the pictures in advance, and the whole point of driving out to a headland with a camera is that you do not yet know what you are going to find there.

What we found was flat white sky and grey boulders the size of small cars, still holding the heat of the morning. Overcast is the great unglamorous gift of the tropics. It turns the whole sky into a softbox, and it means you can put a person anywhere and the light will follow. It also means no drama arrives for free. Everything has to come from the subject and the frame.

She brought the drama. Black wide-brim hat, deconstructed denim, boots with more buckles than sense, and a way of holding still that does not read as posing. That is the rarest thing to photograph. Most people, when asked to stand and do nothing, immediately begin doing something. She simply waited, and let the rock take her weight, and looked somewhere past my shoulder while the roll went through.

The rocks did half the work. Granite is a generous background — mottled, cool, entirely indifferent to fashion — and it makes black clothing read as shape rather than a hole in the frame. Behind it, the green went slightly toxic on the scan. I left it. Colour negative in humid air does that, and correcting it would have flattened the one thing that says exactly where we were.

I metered off her face and opened up, which is what I do with skin on colour negative and will keep doing until it stops working. Nothing was lit. Nothing was moved. The tide came up over the lower shelf around the twentieth frame and made the decision about when to stop.

There is a temptation, editing an afternoon like that, to arrange it into a story. I have stopped bothering. The set is a series of quiet stands against stone, in order, salt drying on everything.

The full set is in the Femme gallery, at jacksonseebohm.com/portfolio/femme.