How long have they been sitting there in silence – he reading his morning newspaper, she lost in thought, gazing with a cryptic half-smile at the reflection in her coffee cup? The answer might be minutes, or decades. The stillness between them feels thick enough to cut with a knife, and yet behind this sedate breakfast scene lies a riot of colour and action: the floral wallpaper and wall hangings; the intensely patterned rug; a riot of maritime activity in the painting overhead. It throws their silence, companionable or otherwise, into almost comically sharp relief.
The couple in the image, which was taken by New York-based Spanish photographer Yolanda del Amo in 2007, are Edith and Juan. They were neighbours of a close friend of Del Amo’s in Argentina, where she was living at the time – but their story was not what she wanted to tell, or not exactly.
“I don’t consider them portraits per se,” she says of the images in her new book, Archipelago, from which this is taken, “because they’re not really talking about these people as they are 100% in real life.” Rather, she worked with her subjects – positioning them in suggestive ways within their own homes, adding or subtracting details around them – to say something more general about relationships in 21st-century society and the distances between us.
Digital technology haunts the series: smartphones and laptops were becoming ubiquitous during the period from 2004 to 2014 when Del Amo was photographing it, and their atomising effect can be detected in many of the pictures.
It’s less of a factor here. Edith and Juan belong to a different era and you can imagine them occupying these same positions, with very little variation, decades earlier. As a result, their separation from one another feels less pronounced, less hard-edged, than some of the others in the book. There is an ease between them, even if it is unspoken, as warm morning light floods the room.
Meanwhile, above their heads, the frenzied maritime struggles rage on.
Archipelago by Yolanda del Amo will be published by Kehrer Verlag on 14 January