


A stone fitting room, dark walls, one small window in the wall behind her. She stands in the right third of the frame, directly in front of a black iron pillar running floor to ceiling, barefoot on a floor grate, her head down and turned left, her eyes closed. Her garment is clear running water cut as a long gown: a straight neckline, a waist seam, and from the small of her back a wide train that pours away behind her, a moving sheet splitting into ropes and threads and separate drops, running away across the grate to the left. An old woman in a grey linen apron, sixty, grey hair pinned up, kneels on the wet floor beside the train with her back half to us and holds a linen tape measure stretched along its edge, reading its length; a stub of tailor's chalk and a soaked paper pattern lie on the stone by her knee. Daylight comes through the small window behind them so the gown and the train glow white and the room around them is almost black. Camera at hip height. The tape, the old woman's hands and the edge of the train are sharp; the far wall falls away soft. Her wet dark auburn hair is pushed back off her face. Everything else in one narrow range of pale stone, wet plaster and grey linen; her skin and the water are the only bright things in the picture. Matte surfaces, no polish. Fine 35mm film grain. In the lower right corner, a large pencil signature in looping script, clearly visible: Ziggy






