“I just loved how the scene stacked up that day, under the strong morning light,” says Jessica Chou. The photographer was celebrating her husband’s birthday with a road trip from Los Angeles, where the pair were living, to San Francisco, then out east, stopping in Lake Tahoe before heading to Utah.
“We knew Lake Tahoe as a ski spot in the winter, so it was nice to see it during the summertime,” she says. “The day we stopped there, the vista was all blue skies, snow-capped mountains, calm lake, miles of sand and, in the middle of all of it, this lady, who had staked out a piece of shade.”
Chou was originally interested in capturing a general sunbathing scene, but was drawn to how the horizontal lines of the landscape and the vertical pole of the umbrella cut through the image in what she describes as “a kind of deadpan manner”.
“I think this photo is really about the sum of its parts,” she adds. “It’s all the little details that provide context and contrast. Having said that, I do think the umbrella does a pretty good job of holding the picture together.”
Chou didn’t speak to the woman, but she did identify her book. “It’s Nemesis by Catherine Coulter, a high-octane FBI thriller that goes through a labyrinth of events. Can’t beat a detail like that.”
