This was the moment when American advertising discovered the male body and could not stop looking, and the picture sits right at that hinge, though it pretends to be nothing but a man cooling off in a Miami garden. He stands nude and waist-deep, seen from behind in a shallow pool ringed by traveller’s palms and banana leaves, his wet hair slicked and his head bowed as if the camera were not there. The sunlight rakes down the muscles of his back like something poured.
Photography here does what it has always done with the nude, which is to borrow the authority of sculpture: the cocked hip, the weight on one leg, the shoulder blades read straight out of a Greek contrapposto, updated with a swimmer’s tan line and a tropical backdrop. But the medium adds what marble cannot, the specific wetness of the hair, the ordinary Florida foliage, the sense of an actual afternoon. It is a classical idea smuggled into a snapshot, which is a very photographic kind of trick.
The man who made it was, by then, the dominant voice in American fashion imagery, and part of what he did was to make the male body respectable as a subject for the camera, neither clinical nor coy. The gelatin silver print is central to how it reads: the long grey scale turns skin, water and leaf into one continuous tissue of tone, and the modest grain lends the whole thing the gravity of a document rather than an advertisement. What the print finally sells is not the man but the light on him.
This was the moment when American advertising discovered the male body and could not stop looking, and the picture sits right at that hinge, though it pretends to be nothing but a man cooling off in a Miami garden. He stands nude and waist-deep, seen from behind in a shallow pool ringed by traveller’s palms and banana leaves, his wet hair slicked and his head bowed as if the camera were not there. The sunlight rakes down the muscles of his back like something poured.
Photography here does what it has always done with the nude, which is to borrow the authority of sculpture: the cocked hip, the weight on one leg, the shoulder blades read straight out of a Greek contrapposto, updated with a swimmer’s tan line and a tropical backdrop. But the medium adds what marble cannot, the specific wetness of the hair, the ordinary Florida foliage, the sense of an actual afternoon. It is a classical idea smuggled into a snapshot, which is a very photographic kind of trick.
The man who made it was, by then, the dominant voice in American fashion imagery, and part of what he did was to make the male body respectable as a subject for the camera, neither clinical nor coy. The gelatin silver print is central to how it reads: the long grey scale turns skin, water and leaf into one continuous tissue of tone, and the modest grain lends the whole thing the gravity of a document rather than an advertisement. What the print finally sells is not the man but the light on him.