We are in the corner of a room, closer than we should be, down at the level of the bare mattress with its quilted ticking. The wall is the green-gold of old plaster; the light comes in hard from the left and posts a shadow across the corner like a sentry. On the mattress a woman has folded herself into the smallest version of herself, knees up, hands stacked on one knee, mouth hidden behind them. Only the eyes are on duty, and they are looking at something that isn’t us.
The beehive does most of the talking. It announces an era, all hairspray and girl groups, while the striped stockings and single black garter strap agree to disagree about which one. A strand of dark pearls slips down from her neck as if trying to leave quietly. Everything here is costume, and nothing about her wariness is. That’s the trick of these interiors: the props say performance, the body says weather. She could be waiting for a knock, or recovering from one. The picture, wisely, declines to referee.
He is best known for suburban houses glowing at night and for roads dissolving through wet windshields, but his rooms are the same pictures turned inside out: the weather has simply come indoors. Born in Kent, Ohio in 1968, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he gives his photographs numbers instead of titles, which suits their air of case files. Prints of his are held by SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney; this one, an archival pigment print, keeps the gold light exactly where it fell.
We are in the corner of a room, closer than we should be, down at the level of the bare mattress with its quilted ticking. The wall is the green-gold of old plaster; the light comes in hard from the left and posts a shadow across the corner like a sentry. On the mattress a woman has folded herself into the smallest version of herself, knees up, hands stacked on one knee, mouth hidden behind them. Only the eyes are on duty, and they are looking at something that isn’t us.
The beehive does most of the talking. It announces an era, all hairspray and girl groups, while the striped stockings and single black garter strap agree to disagree about which one. A strand of dark pearls slips down from her neck as if trying to leave quietly. Everything here is costume, and nothing about her wariness is. That’s the trick of these interiors: the props say performance, the body says weather. She could be waiting for a knock, or recovering from one. The picture, wisely, declines to referee.
He is best known for suburban houses glowing at night and for roads dissolving through wet windshields, but his rooms are the same pictures turned inside out: the weather has simply come indoors. Born in Kent, Ohio in 1968, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he gives his photographs numbers instead of titles, which suits their air of case files. Prints of his are held by SFMOMA, the Getty and the Whitney; this one, an archival pigment print, keeps the gold light exactly where it fell.