Thomas Wågström’s Pictures of the Living and the Lifeless | The New Yorker

One of Thomas Wågström’s pictures has been hanging on the wall above my desk for many years. The picture shows a black surface of water, the patterns and whorls in it, the ceaseless motion that here is fixed in a final pattern, like a sort of rug, in this case a rug woven out of light and shadow. But the picture holds more than that, for at its lower left edge one glimpses the face of an animal: the slit of an eye, a muzzle, a bit of fur. It appears to be a seal, and it is on its way up through the blackness, and in the very next instant, one might imagine, it will pierce through the water. But it hasn’t done so yet; the slit of the eye and the muzzle hover just below the surface and seem almost a part of it.