Now it’s 1994 and here is an article in Elle which helps to define why we find these photographs so mesmerising. It’s because ‘the images are closer to invoking the actual experience of being a woman—being a sister, a wife, a mother, a daughter—than most one-dimensional pictures can’. (Oops, is there something wrong with the grammar? But the point is well made.) It’s the same reason we read fiction of course. They Were Sisters anyone? In novels, as in these photographs, ‘it is not actually vanity that we are ultimately faced with, but the all too brief duration of life. Not only do we change, age, grow old, and one day die—but we do so as suddenly as the eye can sweep between forty still-life portraits.’