A face very close, lit from the right by a light so saturated that the right half of the picture has gone magenta while the left cheek and jaw stay almost white. The eyes are closed. On each closed eyelid, applied like a decal and set with small round stones, sits an interlocking double C. The lips are a dark wine red, slightly parted. Hair falls across the forehead. Nothing else is in the frame.
The monogram on the eyelid is a strange object to look at. It is among the most reproduced marks of the twentieth century, and here it has been reduced to a small handmade thing — beads, adhesive, a curved line that does not quite match its twin because the second eye lies further away and foreshortened. A device designed for infinite identical reproduction has been placed on a surface that guarantees it will never be identical twice.
Photography has always been caught in the same contradiction, which is why the picture is more interesting than a branding exercise. The image can be reproduced without limit; the print of it cannot, and is issued in a fixed edition and signed by hand. Meanwhile the thing depicted — a little adhesive on a warm eyelid, holding for the length of a sitting — was never reproducible at all. Three orders of copying occupy one frame, and only one of them, the eyelid, was ever in danger of moving.
A face very close, lit from the right by a light so saturated that the right half of the picture has gone magenta while the left cheek and jaw stay almost white. The eyes are closed. On each closed eyelid, applied like a decal and set with small round stones, sits an interlocking double C. The lips are a dark wine red, slightly parted. Hair falls across the forehead. Nothing else is in the frame.
The monogram on the eyelid is a strange object to look at. It is among the most reproduced marks of the twentieth century, and here it has been reduced to a small handmade thing — beads, adhesive, a curved line that does not quite match its twin because the second eye lies further away and foreshortened. A device designed for infinite identical reproduction has been placed on a surface that guarantees it will never be identical twice.
Photography has always been caught in the same contradiction, which is why the picture is more interesting than a branding exercise. The image can be reproduced without limit; the print of it cannot, and is issued in a fixed edition and signed by hand. Meanwhile the thing depicted — a little adhesive on a warm eyelid, holding for the length of a sitting — was never reproducible at all. Three orders of copying occupy one frame, and only one of them, the eyelid, was ever in danger of moving.