Steven Meisel

A few faint scratches drift across the surface, scuffs and hairline abrasions scored over the four figures like weather. They are easy to miss, and they change everything, for they tell us we are seeing these women through glass, a smeared, sunlit pane that dissolves the whole scene into golden haze. Four models in black slip dresses stand in a loose row, hands raised and splayed as if pressed against that unseen barrier, and the imperfections in the pane become the very atmosphere of the picture.

The palette is unusual for Meisel, who often worked in silvered black and white: here everything is warmed to amber and honey, the light coming from behind and washing the background to near-white, so the black dresses glow against it. Each woman strikes her own gesture: a raised palm at the left, splayed fingers at the chest, a forearm thrown up to shield the eyes, a pair of hands hanging open at the right. A thigh emerges through a long slit. The composition reads as a frieze, four figures spaced like statuary, caught mid-motion behind the scrim.

The four are Stephanie Seymour, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer and Christy Turlington, the reigning faces of their moment, gathered into a single image. Meisel, who photographed every Vogue Italia cover from 1988 to 2015, understood that their power lay partly in appearing together, a constellation rather than a face. Printed later as an archival pigment print, the picture holds its warm, hazy chromatic scale and the delicate tracery of scratches intact, so the sense of watching four legends through a sunlit window survives in the object.