A lipstick lies at the bottom right of the frame, tipped over, its gold barrel catching a little light, the bullet itself still recognisably a lipstick though the top has been mashed flat. From it a smear of red runs diagonally up and away across the whole picture — thick, ragged, gouged, more like something spread with a knife than something drawn. All of this on a black ground scattered with fine glitter, so that the darkness has a faint mineral sparkle.
Somebody has destroyed a lipstick for our benefit and photographed the result very beautifully. That is a fair summary of a great deal of contemporary advertising, and the honest thing about this picture is that it makes no attempt to pretend otherwise. It is not a picture of a cosmetic. It is a picture of a cosmetic being used up, wasted, applied to nothing, and it is far more appetising than any image of the intact object would be.
The glitter is what tips it. Black ground with a scatter of sparkle is the visual vocabulary of the night sky, and the red mark ploughing across it starts to look astronomical, a nebula or a wound. I find myself half-persuaded by that reading and slightly annoyed at being persuaded, which I suspect is the intended effect. Lipstick, at this magnification, has always been geology.
A lipstick lies at the bottom right of the frame, tipped over, its gold barrel catching a little light, the bullet itself still recognisably a lipstick though the top has been mashed flat. From it a smear of red runs diagonally up and away across the whole picture — thick, ragged, gouged, more like something spread with a knife than something drawn. All of this on a black ground scattered with fine glitter, so that the darkness has a faint mineral sparkle.
Somebody has destroyed a lipstick for our benefit and photographed the result very beautifully. That is a fair summary of a great deal of contemporary advertising, and the honest thing about this picture is that it makes no attempt to pretend otherwise. It is not a picture of a cosmetic. It is a picture of a cosmetic being used up, wasted, applied to nothing, and it is far more appetising than any image of the intact object would be.
The glitter is what tips it. Black ground with a scatter of sparkle is the visual vocabulary of the night sky, and the red mark ploughing across it starts to look astronomical, a nebula or a wound. I find myself half-persuaded by that reading and slightly annoyed at being persuaded, which I suspect is the intended effect. Lipstick, at this magnification, has always been geology.