It was the decade when American fashion learned to photograph the young male body as though it were news, and this is one of its dispatches: a lifeguard against a bare gray wall, a rough towel slung low at his hips. The Italians called the feature the body in close-up, and Weber obliges, cropping the world away until only skin, tousled hair and the plain studio ground remain. He stands as such men are taught to stand, one hand at his waist, the weight easy.
And yet I cannot keep to the torso the picture offers me. My attention slides upward to the other hand, the one lifted to his mouth, where he seems to be biting at a knuckle or a thumbnail, a small, unguarded, faintly nervous act. It is the single thing here that was not rehearsed. The muscles are composed for me, the gaze is composed for me, but that gesture belongs to him alone, and it loosens the whole confident architecture of the pose.
Weber, who in these years gave Calvin Klein its sun-warmed American mythology, was never simply selling desire; he was studying how a body performs its own ease and where the performance leaks. The gelatin silver print is the right instrument for such a reading, its grays continuous and its light without harshness, the flesh held in soft mid-tones that no color could improve. I return to the mouth, to the tooth against the finger, and the confident young man becomes, for a second, a boy caught thinking.
It was the decade when American fashion learned to photograph the young male body as though it were news, and this is one of its dispatches: a lifeguard against a bare gray wall, a rough towel slung low at his hips. The Italians called the feature the body in close-up, and Weber obliges, cropping the world away until only skin, tousled hair and the plain studio ground remain. He stands as such men are taught to stand, one hand at his waist, the weight easy.
And yet I cannot keep to the torso the picture offers me. My attention slides upward to the other hand, the one lifted to his mouth, where he seems to be biting at a knuckle or a thumbnail, a small, unguarded, faintly nervous act. It is the single thing here that was not rehearsed. The muscles are composed for me, the gaze is composed for me, but that gesture belongs to him alone, and it loosens the whole confident architecture of the pose.
Weber, who in these years gave Calvin Klein its sun-warmed American mythology, was never simply selling desire; he was studying how a body performs its own ease and where the performance leaks. The gelatin silver print is the right instrument for such a reading, its grays continuous and its light without harshness, the flesh held in soft mid-tones that no color could improve. I return to the mouth, to the tooth against the finger, and the confident young man becomes, for a second, a boy caught thinking.