The wide black hat brim keeps his eyes for itself, tilting a band of shadow across the upper face so that Charlie Sexton meets us only from the cheekbones down. We are given the pursed mouth, the exhaled smoke, the raised cigarette, and denied the one thing a portrait usually trades in, the look back. A cowboy hat in Manhattan is already a kind of alias, and he wears it like one. The refusal is the picture’s engine, everything legible pushed to the surround while the man himself recedes under felt.
Behind him the wall is a palimpsest of downtown flyers, Brownies on Avenue A, a rock-and-roll night, a hand-drawn sailor asking WHAT IF I WAS A SAILOR, all of it shouting its dates and its names. Photography loves this collision: a face that gives nothing set against a wall that gives everything, the pinstripe suit and skinny tie borrowing gravity from the paper chaos. The more the posters date the moment, the more the man floats free of it.
Weber, who made his name dressing the American body in desire, was also a superb portraitist of downtown cool, and this is a musician photographed as a matinee idol who wandered off the lot. The gelatin silver print gives the scene its newspaper immediacy, deep blacks in the suit and hat against the grey riot of pasted paper. What stays withheld stays valuable; we are left to build the eyes we were not shown, which is finally why the picture keeps its hold.
The wide black hat brim keeps his eyes for itself, tilting a band of shadow across the upper face so that Charlie Sexton meets us only from the cheekbones down. We are given the pursed mouth, the exhaled smoke, the raised cigarette, and denied the one thing a portrait usually trades in, the look back. A cowboy hat in Manhattan is already a kind of alias, and he wears it like one. The refusal is the picture’s engine, everything legible pushed to the surround while the man himself recedes under felt.
Behind him the wall is a palimpsest of downtown flyers, Brownies on Avenue A, a rock-and-roll night, a hand-drawn sailor asking WHAT IF I WAS A SAILOR, all of it shouting its dates and its names. Photography loves this collision: a face that gives nothing set against a wall that gives everything, the pinstripe suit and skinny tie borrowing gravity from the paper chaos. The more the posters date the moment, the more the man floats free of it.
Weber, who made his name dressing the American body in desire, was also a superb portraitist of downtown cool, and this is a musician photographed as a matinee idol who wandered off the lot. The gelatin silver print gives the scene its newspaper immediacy, deep blacks in the suit and hat against the grey riot of pasted paper. What stays withheld stays valuable; we are left to build the eyes we were not shown, which is finally why the picture keeps its hold.