Retrato. Patricia, unadorned and certain. A portrait that doesn’t need a story attached, the face is the story.

I put her against a wall painted this loud red-orange, the kind of color that usually eats a portrait alive. Then she smiled and the wall lost. The red athletic top picks the wall right back up, so the whole frame is basically one warm hum with her face glowing in the middle of it, blue eyes doing the thing blue eyes do against all that heat.

No tricks on this one. Open shade, a big bright wall to bounce it around, and a person who clearly was not nervous in front of a camera. She just lit up and I kept shooting. Some sessions you fight for the frame. This one she handed it to me on the first click and the rest was me trying not to mess it up.