Two men reach across the gap between them, fingers just meeting above a shallow stone pool, and the whole scattered company of nudes seems to hang from that single clasp. The gesture pulls the eye through the picture the way a choreographer would: from the woman posed like a statue on her pedestal at the left, through a figure crouched with his head folded onto his knees, out to the bodies draped along a balustrade at the right, one arm still extended to complete the human chain. It is a tableau built entirely of arms and intervals.
The staging is unabashedly art-historical, a garden bacchanal quoting the linked dancers of Matisse and the marble population of a classical park, yet the direction keeps it cool rather than reverent. Real bodies stand in for statuary; a woman lies full-length on the mown grass while another balances motionless on a plinth, the joke being that we cannot always tell the living from the sculpted. Montecito light, hazy and high, flattens the trees behind into a soft grey screen, holding the arrangement like a frieze.
This blend of Arcadian fantasy and directorial control is exactly what made the photographer the defining eye of American fashion in the 1980s, an image-maker who could turn a private garden into a stage for unembarrassed idyll. The gelatin silver print gives the scene its warm, slightly antique body, the tonal softness that lets skin, stone and foliage share one continuous surface. Look long enough and the picture stops being provocative and becomes almost pastoral, a company of strangers arranged into a momentary republic of bodies.
Two men reach across the gap between them, fingers just meeting above a shallow stone pool, and the whole scattered company of nudes seems to hang from that single clasp. The gesture pulls the eye through the picture the way a choreographer would: from the woman posed like a statue on her pedestal at the left, through a figure crouched with his head folded onto his knees, out to the bodies draped along a balustrade at the right, one arm still extended to complete the human chain. It is a tableau built entirely of arms and intervals.
The staging is unabashedly art-historical, a garden bacchanal quoting the linked dancers of Matisse and the marble population of a classical park, yet the direction keeps it cool rather than reverent. Real bodies stand in for statuary; a woman lies full-length on the mown grass while another balances motionless on a plinth, the joke being that we cannot always tell the living from the sculpted. Montecito light, hazy and high, flattens the trees behind into a soft grey screen, holding the arrangement like a frieze.
This blend of Arcadian fantasy and directorial control is exactly what made the photographer the defining eye of American fashion in the 1980s, an image-maker who could turn a private garden into a stage for unembarrassed idyll. The gelatin silver print gives the scene its warm, slightly antique body, the tonal softness that lets skin, stone and foliage share one continuous surface. Look long enough and the picture stops being provocative and becomes almost pastoral, a company of strangers arranged into a momentary republic of bodies.