Untitled #49 (Sally Salt Says) 1999

Anna Gaskell took this large photograph, Untitled #49 (Sally Salt Says), with film, somewhere, sometime. The girl’s fiery red hair is really doing it for me. And what’s going on with those sleeves? Those gorgeous white sleeves? It’s that kind of detail that an artist like Gaskell really hones in on. I imagine her in the studio, turning the scene this way and that, shifting the light, thinking about how a sleeve catches the light, how hair can obscure a face… It's interesting to me how she might have seen those sleeves and remembered, say, Caravaggio, and how he used sleeves to tell a story…and then twist it into something else, something completely her own. That's what artists do; we are magpies, obsessed with the world and the history of art, we see something old, and we transform it into something utterly new.