A blond bob, a studded leather jacket, a brick wall — and where the eyes should be, a mask built from flattened aluminium cans and torn energy-drink wrapper, yellow and blue, the word PERFORMANCE still legible across the bridge of the nose. Two can-ends face outward like lenses. Below the mask the picture is entirely conventional: clear skin, a few freckles, a mouth at rest. She is not hiding behind the rubbish. She is wearing it.
I notice that I can still read the branding, and that is the strange part. The wrapper has been crushed, folded and taped into a shape, and it has survived the process legibly enough that I know what was drunk and roughly where. This is packaging designed to be read at speed from a shelf, and it goes on performing that job after being destroyed. The leather jacket beneath it is expensive and anonymous. The garbage is the only thing in the frame that names a brand.
There is a long habit in fashion of picking up the discarded object and calling it beautiful, and the habit is not innocent; it borrows the visual energy of scarcity while keeping a careful distance from it. What holds me is that the picture does not pretend otherwise. It places the trash exactly over the eyes — the part of a portrait we go to for interiority — and hands us a mouth instead. Whatever this young woman thinks about being made into a receptacle, the photograph has arranged not to tell us.
A blond bob, a studded leather jacket, a brick wall — and where the eyes should be, a mask built from flattened aluminium cans and torn energy-drink wrapper, yellow and blue, the word PERFORMANCE still legible across the bridge of the nose. Two can-ends face outward like lenses. Below the mask the picture is entirely conventional: clear skin, a few freckles, a mouth at rest. She is not hiding behind the rubbish. She is wearing it.
I notice that I can still read the branding, and that is the strange part. The wrapper has been crushed, folded and taped into a shape, and it has survived the process legibly enough that I know what was drunk and roughly where. This is packaging designed to be read at speed from a shelf, and it goes on performing that job after being destroyed. The leather jacket beneath it is expensive and anonymous. The garbage is the only thing in the frame that names a brand.
There is a long habit in fashion of picking up the discarded object and calling it beautiful, and the habit is not innocent; it borrows the visual energy of scarcity while keeping a careful distance from it. What holds me is that the picture does not pretend otherwise. It places the trash exactly over the eyes — the part of a portrait we go to for interiority — and hands us a mouth instead. Whatever this young woman thinks about being made into a receptacle, the photograph has arranged not to tell us.