The studium first: a figure photographed frontally against a mottled blue ground, in an immense black quilted jacket that balloons from the shoulders into an almost perfect sphere, long leather gloves, and trousers that begin tight at the thigh and flare to the floor in two vast weighted cones. A black cap. The stance is wide, the arms hang forward, and the resulting silhouette is not a human silhouette at all; it is nearer to a bell, or to a piece of furniture.
What pricks me is the face. It is small — the jacket has made it small — and it is entirely unaltered: a young woman's face, calm, lips slightly parted, looking straight into the lens with an expression of great patience. All around it the body has been abolished, converted into volume, and the face has been left exactly as it is, at the top of the sphere, at the scale of a real face. The mismatch between the two is the wound.
I keep trying to find the shoulders and I cannot. I do not know where her arms are inside that jacket; I can locate the hands only because the gloves emerge. And yet, looking at the face, I am certain of her weight, her tiredness, the length of the day. That is the peculiar economy of the photograph: it takes away the whole body, leaves one small unretouched patch, and from that patch I reconstruct everything the costume was designed to erase.
The studium first: a figure photographed frontally against a mottled blue ground, in an immense black quilted jacket that balloons from the shoulders into an almost perfect sphere, long leather gloves, and trousers that begin tight at the thigh and flare to the floor in two vast weighted cones. A black cap. The stance is wide, the arms hang forward, and the resulting silhouette is not a human silhouette at all; it is nearer to a bell, or to a piece of furniture.
What pricks me is the face. It is small — the jacket has made it small — and it is entirely unaltered: a young woman's face, calm, lips slightly parted, looking straight into the lens with an expression of great patience. All around it the body has been abolished, converted into volume, and the face has been left exactly as it is, at the top of the sphere, at the scale of a real face. The mismatch between the two is the wound.
I keep trying to find the shoulders and I cannot. I do not know where her arms are inside that jacket; I can locate the hands only because the gloves emerge. And yet, looking at the face, I am certain of her weight, her tiredness, the length of the day. That is the peculiar economy of the photograph: it takes away the whole body, leaves one small unretouched patch, and from that patch I reconstruct everything the costume was designed to erase.