A moment ago, perhaps, both bodies lay flat in the dry grass; now one has risen to his knees, spine arched, throat offered up, eyes shut against a sun you cannot see but feel in every blanched blade of the meadow. The other has not moved, cheek pressed to folded arms, still inside sleep or its pretense. Between them the interval is the whole picture: one figure climbing toward the light, the other sunk into the ground, caught in the half-second before either changes his mind.
Photography is good at this, at slicing an ongoing afternoon into a single frame that reads as inevitable, though nothing here is resolved. The kneeling man’s hand rests on his own thigh; the dark briefs are the only deep note in a scale of bleached greys, tan skin against tawny stubble-grass. Bright overhead light flattens the tonal range almost to a sheet, then finds the shoulder, the ribs, the tendon behind the knee. It looks candid and is plainly composed, an arcadia built to seem stumbled upon, the oldest trick, still convincing.
Made near Point Conception, on the wild California coast, it distills the sun-warmed Americana this photographer made his subject through the 1980s and after: athletes, nudes, the body treated as landscape and landscape as a place to lie down in. The gelatin silver print is where the picture belongs, its continuous tone holding both the fierce glare and the soft grain of dry grass without a break. A hand-developed surface, black to white in one unbroken breath, it keeps the afternoon exactly at this pitch, neither rising nor cooling.
A moment ago, perhaps, both bodies lay flat in the dry grass; now one has risen to his knees, spine arched, throat offered up, eyes shut against a sun you cannot see but feel in every blanched blade of the meadow. The other has not moved, cheek pressed to folded arms, still inside sleep or its pretense. Between them the interval is the whole picture: one figure climbing toward the light, the other sunk into the ground, caught in the half-second before either changes his mind.
Photography is good at this, at slicing an ongoing afternoon into a single frame that reads as inevitable, though nothing here is resolved. The kneeling man’s hand rests on his own thigh; the dark briefs are the only deep note in a scale of bleached greys, tan skin against tawny stubble-grass. Bright overhead light flattens the tonal range almost to a sheet, then finds the shoulder, the ribs, the tendon behind the knee. It looks candid and is plainly composed, an arcadia built to seem stumbled upon, the oldest trick, still convincing.
Made near Point Conception, on the wild California coast, it distills the sun-warmed Americana this photographer made his subject through the 1980s and after: athletes, nudes, the body treated as landscape and landscape as a place to lie down in. The gelatin silver print is where the picture belongs, its continuous tone holding both the fierce glare and the soft grain of dry grass without a break. A hand-developed surface, black to white in one unbroken breath, it keeps the afternoon exactly at this pitch, neither rising nor cooling.