This Week's Photo

Mona Hatoum

Van Gogh's Back

Mona Hatoum's Van Gogh's Back makes us jump mentally from the swirls of hair on the man's wet back to the starry skies of van Gogh's swirling paintwork.

The enjoyment of such a photograph is based on our shift from registering a photographic image as a three-dimensional scene (something we respond to because of its presentation of a sculptural object or event that we trust once existed in the real world) and that of two-dimensional, graphic representation of the swirls of wet hair that we connect, via van Gogh, to a patterned sky.

The interplay of two- and three-dimensional spaces is one of the great pleasures of looking at photographs.