Cigarette, Glass, Bare Skin by the Water—Getting the Ratio Right

Photographer John Joseph Estevez shot a series with Argentine model Guadi Galano—Dip—and it’s exactly what the title suggests: a woman by a cold pool, by a lake, in a sunlit apartment, topless, cigarette burning, something cold in her glass, going nowhere in particular.

There’s a fantasy in these photos that has nothing to do with the nudity—or not just the nudity. It’s the pace. The complete absence of urgency. Galano moves through the frames like someone who has made a private agreement with herself about what her time is worth and doesn’t feel the need to renegotiate it with anyone. That’s either a very easy thing to photograph or a very hard one. Either way, Estevez caught it.

I think about that pace sometimes in the middle of the kind of week that makes you wonder where things went sideways. You know the feeling—the sense that the machinery of obligation has been running so long you can’t remember agreeing to any of it. The answer isn’t a photo shoot by a lake, obviously. But the question it asks is real: at what point did leisure become something you had to schedule two weeks out and justify to three people?

Galano, at least in these frames, hasn’t asked anyone’s permission for anything. The cigarette is lit. The drink is cold. The afternoon goes on as long as it wants to.