Just There

There’s a photoshoot by John Joseph Estevez I can’t stop looking at. He photographed Guadi Galano, an Argentine model, for something called Dip. Three simple settings: a pool, a lake, an apartment flooded with light. She’s topless in all of them. Cigarette burning, glass in hand, that’s the whole concept.

What gets me is how unbothered it all is. She’s not performing ease or trying to make a statement about freedom or the body. She’s just sitting there with a cigarette and whatever’s in her glass, letting the light do its thing. No agenda. No performance. No reason for any of it beyond the moment itself.

I think people respond to photographs like this because they’re the opposite of everything else we look at. Most imagery of bodies is working toward something—a story, an emotion, an idea you’re supposed to take away. These images just watch and don’t add anything to what they’re watching. The cigarette is just a cigarette. The light is just light. She’s just there.

There’s something about that restraint that feels true. Estevez could have narrated these images a dozen different ways, but he didn’t. He just looked and shot. That’s the whole thing.