Profile, against a coral ground with a band of shadow at the right. The face and throat have been coated in a pale clay that has dried and cracked into a fine crazed net, so the skin reads as a glazed surface rather than as skin; the shoulder below is left bare and gleaming. One eyelid is gold. The mouth is a saturated red, unbroken, wet. At the temple the hair has been lacquered flat and streaked with red, combed into parallel ridges.
The studium is the mask, and it is a strong one: mud, gold, red lacquer, the whole apparatus of the ritual face as fashion has repeatedly borrowed it. I could write about that. But what pierces me is a far smaller thing — the ear. The ear has been left entirely alone. In a picture where every other surface has been treated, painted, dried or combed, the ear is simply an ear, warm, unpainted, slightly translucent where light comes through the rim.
And it is the ear that tells me she is alive and hot and probably uncomfortable, that the clay is tightening as it dries, that this took an hour and will take another to remove. The mask addresses eternity; the ear reports on the afternoon. I did not choose this detail and it was not placed there for me — nobody styles an ear by leaving it — which is precisely the condition of the wound. The photograph offers me a goddess and then, at the edge of the frame, forgets to.
Profile, against a coral ground with a band of shadow at the right. The face and throat have been coated in a pale clay that has dried and cracked into a fine crazed net, so the skin reads as a glazed surface rather than as skin; the shoulder below is left bare and gleaming. One eyelid is gold. The mouth is a saturated red, unbroken, wet. At the temple the hair has been lacquered flat and streaked with red, combed into parallel ridges.
The studium is the mask, and it is a strong one: mud, gold, red lacquer, the whole apparatus of the ritual face as fashion has repeatedly borrowed it. I could write about that. But what pierces me is a far smaller thing — the ear. The ear has been left entirely alone. In a picture where every other surface has been treated, painted, dried or combed, the ear is simply an ear, warm, unpainted, slightly translucent where light comes through the rim.
And it is the ear that tells me she is alive and hot and probably uncomfortable, that the clay is tightening as it dries, that this took an hour and will take another to remove. The mask addresses eternity; the ear reports on the afternoon. I did not choose this detail and it was not placed there for me — nobody styles an ear by leaving it — which is precisely the condition of the wound. The photograph offers me a goddess and then, at the edge of the frame, forgets to.