The frame holds one eye and the skin immediately around it, enlarged past the point where a face would be recognisable. The upper lid is a slick blue-black; the lashes have been gathered into stiff separated points, less like hair than like the teeth of something. A white powder, frost or crushed mineral, is packed along the brow and the outer cheek, and beneath the eye there is a wash of pale gold. The iris is amber, and in it, small and sharp, sits a reflected window.
I keep returning to that window. Everything else here has been applied — the blue, the frost, the gold, the spikes — and the reflection is the one thing that arrived on its own, evidence of a room I cannot see and of a photographer standing more or less where I am standing now. Cathrine has a name in the title but not a face in the image. She is present as a surface being worked on, and as the single aperture through which the working room looks back.
Fashion photography is often accused of dismembering, and the accusation is not baseless; a picture that takes an eye and discards the woman has done something. But looking longer I find the charge harder to hold. The skin is not smoothed: there are pores, a flush of red at the inner corner, fine down on the temple. The cosmetic is spectacular and the body beneath it is ordinary and unretouched, and the photograph declines to reconcile them. It leaves me with the fact that the elaborate thing and the mortal thing are the same few square centimetres.
The frame holds one eye and the skin immediately around it, enlarged past the point where a face would be recognisable. The upper lid is a slick blue-black; the lashes have been gathered into stiff separated points, less like hair than like the teeth of something. A white powder, frost or crushed mineral, is packed along the brow and the outer cheek, and beneath the eye there is a wash of pale gold. The iris is amber, and in it, small and sharp, sits a reflected window.
I keep returning to that window. Everything else here has been applied — the blue, the frost, the gold, the spikes — and the reflection is the one thing that arrived on its own, evidence of a room I cannot see and of a photographer standing more or less where I am standing now. Cathrine has a name in the title but not a face in the image. She is present as a surface being worked on, and as the single aperture through which the working room looks back.
Fashion photography is often accused of dismembering, and the accusation is not baseless; a picture that takes an eye and discards the woman has done something. But looking longer I find the charge harder to hold. The skin is not smoothed: there are pores, a flush of red at the inner corner, fine down on the temple. The cosmetic is spectacular and the body beneath it is ordinary and unretouched, and the photograph declines to reconcile them. It leaves me with the fact that the elaborate thing and the mortal thing are the same few square centimetres.