The Girl, the Shark, and the Green Plastic Grass

You know how it goes in Los Angeles. You’re alone in a villa with a freshly cleaned pool and the heat is making everything feel slightly unreal and you have a camera and a phone and a vague sense that the day should amount to something. Photographer Brad Elterman solved this problem the obvious way: he called a girl.

Her name is Sara Cummings, which raises eyebrows at Catholic parishes but commands attention everywhere else. Brad needed someone to help him mark the start of summer at Villa Le Reve—the dream villa, the poolside afternoon, the inflatable shark lurking in the shallow end. Nudity alone doesn’t give me much, he explained. I need a story.

The story he came up with was this: there’s a shark. It swims toward the girl. She ignores it for a while, then decides to ride it. When that gets boring she lies down on a patch of green plastic grass with her camera and relaxes. It sounds like nothing. On the page it is nothing. But Brad shot it for the French Purple Fashion Magazine and on that page it becomes summer itself—indolent and sun-drunk and slightly absurd. That’s the trick with the best editorial photography. The concept is almost always embarrassing to describe out loud. The images don’t care.