I wanted the driest possible stage for a woman doing wet, unfinished emotional labor with her hands — a salt-pan, cracked and blue, where the only heat in the whole frame is her skin. The Tswana-Frisian fusion gave me those pale hazel-grey eyes against deep umber, and I aimed them at the work but let them lag a half-second behind, the dissonance the brief demands. She is fixing the cuff perfectly; her knuckles are too tight. That gap is the photograph. — Mira