Statues have all the time in the world, which is exactly why nothing happens to them. Here is one, a marble youth on a white plinth with a coy fig leaf, planted at the left of the frame with the patience of the immortal. Beside him, on cracked Los Angeles asphalt, a living woman has folded herself in half to fling her long blonde hair forward, black high heels braced, a little white bottle set on the ground within reach. He is finished. She is still becoming.
The joke, and it is a good one, concerns which of them is the work of art. The statue is generic perfection, the kind of body cast in plaster since antiquity; the woman, upside down and mid-grooming, is doing something no sculptor would choose to immortalise, and is therefore far more alive. Her hair becomes the picture’s real event, a pale cascade catching the hard sun, while the marble stays marble, admirably indifferent to the light warming its thigh.
Weber shot this on the Zoetrope studio lot, a dream factory of images, and the setting is the argument: an industry that manufactures ideals, photographed in its scruffy backyard. Unusually for him the work reaches us as an archival pigment print, its long tonal range and matte breadth suited to all this sunstruck plaster and stucco. The eye keeps travelling between the two figures, the fixed and the flailing, and cannot decide. Perhaps that indecision is the point, and beauty only appears when it is caught off duty.
Statues have all the time in the world, which is exactly why nothing happens to them. Here is one, a marble youth on a white plinth with a coy fig leaf, planted at the left of the frame with the patience of the immortal. Beside him, on cracked Los Angeles asphalt, a living woman has folded herself in half to fling her long blonde hair forward, black high heels braced, a little white bottle set on the ground within reach. He is finished. She is still becoming.
The joke, and it is a good one, concerns which of them is the work of art. The statue is generic perfection, the kind of body cast in plaster since antiquity; the woman, upside down and mid-grooming, is doing something no sculptor would choose to immortalise, and is therefore far more alive. Her hair becomes the picture’s real event, a pale cascade catching the hard sun, while the marble stays marble, admirably indifferent to the light warming its thigh.
Weber shot this on the Zoetrope studio lot, a dream factory of images, and the setting is the argument: an industry that manufactures ideals, photographed in its scruffy backyard. Unusually for him the work reaches us as an archival pigment print, its long tonal range and matte breadth suited to all this sunstruck plaster and stucco. The eye keeps travelling between the two figures, the fixed and the flailing, and cannot decide. Perhaps that indecision is the point, and beauty only appears when it is caught off duty.