Steven Meisel

What Liya Kebede withholds is the face's ordinary work. She gives the camera cheekbones, chin, the enormous dark architecture of her hair, but the eyes stay heavy-lidded, sealed around some private calculation; backed into the corner of a gray-blue salon, one hand at her hip, yellow feathers spilling from the fur on her arms, she performs display while conceding nothing.

Around her, the picture cheerfully confesses its own manufacture. Cherry blossom does not storm indoors: these branches were cut, hauled in, and leaned across sofa and carpet in a choreographed catastrophe. At the lower edge the purple floor lifts and curls, betraying itself as a rolled-out ground rather than a floor at all. The paneled walls are a set; the ruin was scheduled; even spring, in this room, is a prop with a delivery date.

And the print extends the fabrication by other means: sprayed pigment on paper, a flat object whose lush depths are strictly chemical. Photography has always preserved what was already dying — cut flowers are among its oldest accomplices — and Meisel builds that embalming into the scene itself. Only her withholding resists the apparatus. It is the one thing here that was not manufactured, and the lens records it without ever getting in.