Notice the single wet hand that rises out of the water to cradle the second boy’s own head, the only limb the picture allows above the surface. Everything else is withheld beneath a rippled skin of water: two torsos, four shoulders, whatever else joins these near-identical faces. Two young men, twins, press cheek to temple with only their heads afloat against a mottled plaster wall. Both stare straight out, unblinking, as if the water were a held breath. That lone hand, fingers spread in dark hair, tells you how much body the frame has chosen to submerge.
A photograph, like a twin, is a thing that arrives in doubles, one face standing in for another, resemblance carrying the whole charge. Here the doubling is literal and uncanny: the same brow, the same set of the mouth, differing only in a freckle, a tilt, the beading of water on one lip and not the other. The waterline runs across both throats like a horizon, and below it the reflected light dissolves into pure abstraction, silver ripples with no fixed edge.
The artist made his name on exactly this register of American youth, athletic, tender, faintly melancholy, yet the closeness here feels less staged than caught. As an object the gelatin silver print rewards the attention: its grey scale runs from the near-white wall to the dark wet hair without a break, and the surface holds the water’s texture as something you almost want to touch. Chemistry, not glamour, fixes these two faces at the moment before they slip under.
Notice the single wet hand that rises out of the water to cradle the second boy’s own head, the only limb the picture allows above the surface. Everything else is withheld beneath a rippled skin of water: two torsos, four shoulders, whatever else joins these near-identical faces. Two young men, twins, press cheek to temple with only their heads afloat against a mottled plaster wall. Both stare straight out, unblinking, as if the water were a held breath. That lone hand, fingers spread in dark hair, tells you how much body the frame has chosen to submerge.
A photograph, like a twin, is a thing that arrives in doubles, one face standing in for another, resemblance carrying the whole charge. Here the doubling is literal and uncanny: the same brow, the same set of the mouth, differing only in a freckle, a tilt, the beading of water on one lip and not the other. The waterline runs across both throats like a horizon, and below it the reflected light dissolves into pure abstraction, silver ripples with no fixed edge.
The artist made his name on exactly this register of American youth, athletic, tender, faintly melancholy, yet the closeness here feels less staged than caught. As an object the gelatin silver print rewards the attention: its grey scale runs from the near-white wall to the dark wet hair without a break, and the surface holds the water’s texture as something you almost want to touch. Chemistry, not glamour, fixes these two faces at the moment before they slip under.