Whose eyes are those, so pale they look lit from within, and how did a world-champion surfer wind up posed like a matinee idol in a Manhattan studio? He wears a stiff white collar, the spiked dark hair still faintly wet, the jaw set for the camera as if he had rehearsed this all his life instead of spending it on waves. The tan tells one story; the styling insists on another.
There is something gloriously incongruous about it. You expect salt water and instead get seamless studio grey, the kind of lighting that once made Montgomery Clift and James Dean look sculpted from marble. Weber knows the trick and plays it straight, sliding an athlete into the costume of old Hollywood and letting us enjoy the mismatch, a champion impersonating a legend. The upward tilt of the head is pure fan magazine; the parted lips are almost a dare. He is being sold to us, and he seems to know it, and not to mind.
This is what Weber does better than anyone: he finds the movie star dormant in the sportsman and coaxes it out. He remade American fashion by treating the everyday body as classical statuary, and here a surfboard prodigy becomes an icon of another kind. The gelatin silver print earns the comparison, its long scale of greys giving the skin its sheen and the eyes their unlikely light. Squint and the year dissolves; he could be any decade’s heartthrob, waiting for the shutter, waiting to be adored.
Whose eyes are those, so pale they look lit from within, and how did a world-champion surfer wind up posed like a matinee idol in a Manhattan studio? He wears a stiff white collar, the spiked dark hair still faintly wet, the jaw set for the camera as if he had rehearsed this all his life instead of spending it on waves. The tan tells one story; the styling insists on another.
There is something gloriously incongruous about it. You expect salt water and instead get seamless studio grey, the kind of lighting that once made Montgomery Clift and James Dean look sculpted from marble. Weber knows the trick and plays it straight, sliding an athlete into the costume of old Hollywood and letting us enjoy the mismatch, a champion impersonating a legend. The upward tilt of the head is pure fan magazine; the parted lips are almost a dare. He is being sold to us, and he seems to know it, and not to mind.
This is what Weber does better than anyone: he finds the movie star dormant in the sportsman and coaxes it out. He remade American fashion by treating the everyday body as classical statuary, and here a surfboard prodigy becomes an icon of another kind. The gelatin silver print earns the comparison, its long scale of greys giving the skin its sheen and the eyes their unlikely light. Squint and the year dissolves; he could be any decade’s heartthrob, waiting for the shutter, waiting to be adored.