On a screened summer porch the light arrives sideways, landing on a young man who wears nothing but his own composure. He sits astride a rocking horse whose runners curl into shadow at his feet, one heel hooked on its padded head, the other sole flat on dark plank flooring. Behind him a window holds a wall of blurred trees; beside him a curtain hangs striped like a beach cabana, pale bars alternating with grey. His profile is turned toward the daylight, holding a middle distance that no camp morning could quite account for.
Photographs of a beautiful body always propose that we look without guilt, and this one presses the offer hard. Even, flattering light describes the ridged abdomen, the long thigh, the profile lifted toward something outside the frame. What complicates the pleasure is the furniture of memory around him: a battered steamer trunk banded in metal, a child’s toy turned into a pedestal. Idyll and inventory sit together, the camera cataloguing a physique with a merchant’s care.
This is the paradox the artist made his subject: American wholesomeness photographed with an appetite that refuses to stay wholesome. Across the Calvin Klein years he taught a decade to see summer camps, athletes and sun-warmed skin as objects of longing, and here the longing is precise. The gelatin silver print holds it all in a grey at once tender and cool, the trunk’s worn leather and the boy’s shoulder given the same patient tones. It seduces, and knows that it does.
On a screened summer porch the light arrives sideways, landing on a young man who wears nothing but his own composure. He sits astride a rocking horse whose runners curl into shadow at his feet, one heel hooked on its padded head, the other sole flat on dark plank flooring. Behind him a window holds a wall of blurred trees; beside him a curtain hangs striped like a beach cabana, pale bars alternating with grey. His profile is turned toward the daylight, holding a middle distance that no camp morning could quite account for.
Photographs of a beautiful body always propose that we look without guilt, and this one presses the offer hard. Even, flattering light describes the ridged abdomen, the long thigh, the profile lifted toward something outside the frame. What complicates the pleasure is the furniture of memory around him: a battered steamer trunk banded in metal, a child’s toy turned into a pedestal. Idyll and inventory sit together, the camera cataloguing a physique with a merchant’s care.
This is the paradox the artist made his subject: American wholesomeness photographed with an appetite that refuses to stay wholesome. Across the Calvin Klein years he taught a decade to see summer camps, athletes and sun-warmed skin as objects of longing, and here the longing is precise. The gelatin silver print holds it all in a grey at once tender and cool, the trunk’s worn leather and the boy’s shoulder given the same patient tones. It seduces, and knows that it does.