The reeds bow all at once, a whole wall of them bending left in a gust the picture has stopped mid-sway. Their feathery heads blur where the wind takes them; their stalks lean like a crowd turning to look. And along the very bottom of the frame, laid out small and pale in the grass, a naked young man sleeps, or seems to, one arm behind his head, eyes closed to the sky. The motion is all above him. He does not stir.
It is a seductive arrangement, and one ought to be a little wary of it. To lay a beautiful body flat at the foot of a towering nature is to borrow a very old rhetoric: the sleeping shepherd, the nymph in the grove, the figure offered to the eye as one more fruit of the landscape. Weber knows the device and performs it without apology. Yet this is not quite an idyll. A body stretched horizontal, still, eyes shut, rehearses another posture too, and the reeds leaning toward him are lush and faintly funereal at once.
That doubleness is what keeps the image honest. Weber, who taught American advertising to sell desire as fresh air and open country, here lets the desire shade toward something graver without breaking the spell. The gelatin silver print is essential to it: silver renders the reeds in a hundred greys and keeps the sleep-pale flesh luminous against the dark tangle, refusing to let the figure vanish. We are seduced and uneasy at once, which may be the truest response a photograph like this can earn.
The reeds bow all at once, a whole wall of them bending left in a gust the picture has stopped mid-sway. Their feathery heads blur where the wind takes them; their stalks lean like a crowd turning to look. And along the very bottom of the frame, laid out small and pale in the grass, a naked young man sleeps, or seems to, one arm behind his head, eyes closed to the sky. The motion is all above him. He does not stir.
It is a seductive arrangement, and one ought to be a little wary of it. To lay a beautiful body flat at the foot of a towering nature is to borrow a very old rhetoric: the sleeping shepherd, the nymph in the grove, the figure offered to the eye as one more fruit of the landscape. Weber knows the device and performs it without apology. Yet this is not quite an idyll. A body stretched horizontal, still, eyes shut, rehearses another posture too, and the reeds leaning toward him are lush and faintly funereal at once.
That doubleness is what keeps the image honest. Weber, who taught American advertising to sell desire as fresh air and open country, here lets the desire shade toward something graver without breaking the spell. The gelatin silver print is essential to it: silver renders the reeds in a hundred greys and keeps the sleep-pale flesh luminous against the dark tangle, refusing to let the figure vanish. We are seduced and uneasy at once, which may be the truest response a photograph like this can earn.