A bounty of surface could just as easily describe The Gray Room, the poem from which this series takes its title, by the modernist poet Wallace Stevens. ‘He was so accepting of the surface,’ Soth says, whereas ‘I always want there to be more, I want to get under’. Yet, shooting this series was different. ‘I had this nice balance,’ he says. With Nick, this sense of equilibrium makes even the slightest detail wink with oracular meaning: the painterly bursts of pink, out-of-focus bougainvillea on the left find their foil in a heavy, chintzy, berry-coloured blanket on the right. The scrambling plants surrounding the glass room speak to a vaguely metaphorical tangle of wires on the floor inside it.