

A photograph in the top-floor room of an old building at dawn, empty, one tall window on the right giving flat grey light. In the middle of the bare floorboards there is a dark opening where three boards have been lifted out, and the hole is solid black with no detail in it. She stands beyond it, off to the left, naked. Four pale cords, each as thick as a bootlace, are knotted tight around her two wrists and her two ankles and run downward from her into the black opening in the floor, dead straight and stretched, with no slack and no loops anywhere in them. They are pulling. Her wrists are dragged down and slightly forward and her hands hang open past her hips, her shoulders are pulled down and rounded, her neck is stretched long, one heel has come up off the boards and her whole weight has gone onto the ball of that foot, and her body is leaning back a little against the pull. Her skin is drawn and dented where each cord is knotted. Her head is down and her eyes are on the opening. Her hair falls forward past her face. A man's charcoal wool coat lies crumpled on the boards beside the hole. The camera is right down on the floorboards close to the opening and looking up at her with a wide lens, so the near edge of the hole and the four cords leaving it are huge and out of focus across the bottom of the frame, and she stands small and sharp beyond them with the window and the empty grey wall far behind her. Everything is grey, black and old wood except her skin. Fine grain. In the lower right corner, a small pencil signature: Ziggy