By 1987, at the headland of Point Conception where the California coast turns its shoulder against the Pacific, the photographer had already made the male body his country's most marketable subject — and here he withholds the face entirely. Neither young man will give us his eyes. We are shown two backs and a horizon, and asked to want them anyway.
To photograph the nude from behind is to convert desire into something closer to reverence. The seated figure clasps his own drawn-up knees; the second has let his head fall against the first's shoulder blades, his weight handed over without a word. The grass is bleached pale and brittle, the sky scrubbed to a flat unbroken white that refuses depth, so that the sea reads as a single ruled line. Everything is rendered in the high, hard light of midday, which flatters muscle by mapping it — the channel of a spine, the small declivity at the base of the back — and which leaves nowhere for sentiment to hide.
What the picture knows, and will not say, is that intimacy photographed always becomes a kind of advertisement; tenderness, once framed, is offered for consumption. This is the contradiction the artist built a career on, and it is why the image holds. The averted heads make accomplices of us. We are permitted to look precisely because the looked-at do not look back — the oldest license the camera grants, and the most uneasy.
A signature print from the years that fixed his idiom, it belongs to the same coastal vocabulary as the work gathered in his monographs of the period. The arrangement is candid in pose and exact in composition: two bodies, one horizon, and the long American habit of mistaking a beautiful surface for an open door.
By 1987, at the headland of Point Conception where the California coast turns its shoulder against the Pacific, the photographer had already made the male body his country's most marketable subject — and here he withholds the face entirely. Neither young man will give us his eyes. We are shown two backs and a horizon, and asked to want them anyway.
To photograph the nude from behind is to convert desire into something closer to reverence. The seated figure clasps his own drawn-up knees; the second has let his head fall against the first's shoulder blades, his weight handed over without a word. The grass is bleached pale and brittle, the sky scrubbed to a flat unbroken white that refuses depth, so that the sea reads as a single ruled line. Everything is rendered in the high, hard light of midday, which flatters muscle by mapping it — the channel of a spine, the small declivity at the base of the back — and which leaves nowhere for sentiment to hide.
What the picture knows, and will not say, is that intimacy photographed always becomes a kind of advertisement; tenderness, once framed, is offered for consumption. This is the contradiction the artist built a career on, and it is why the image holds. The averted heads make accomplices of us. We are permitted to look precisely because the looked-at do not look back — the oldest license the camera grants, and the most uneasy.
A signature print from the years that fixed his idiom, it belongs to the same coastal vocabulary as the work gathered in his monographs of the period. The arrangement is candid in pose and exact in composition: two bodies, one horizon, and the long American habit of mistaking a beautiful surface for an open door.