By the early nineties Weber had turned the Adirondack woods into a national daydream, and this is what it looked like from behind: two blond twins, naked, balanced on the sawn crown of a felled log whose growth rings fan out beneath their heels. The decade wanted its bodies clean, athletic, faintly mythological, and the Brewer twins oblige without appearing to try. They could be a single figure caught between two mirrors, or a woodland deity that budded and forgot to split.
What keeps the picture from tipping into kitsch is the log itself, an unglamorous slab of dead tree with cracks radiating from its centre like a target. On this rough pedestal the twins stand with the unbothered symmetry of siblings who have shared a bathroom their whole lives. One hand rests on a hip; the ferns behind them dissolve into a wall of soft grey-black. There is comedy in it, and tenderness, and the absurdity of asking two teenagers to impersonate Eden while the mosquitoes feast.
Weber, who defined American fashion in the 1980s and never stopped photographing the Adirondacks as if they were the last honest place, made a whole genre out of the male nude at ease in nature. This gelatin silver print is where his instincts converge: the tonal reach from wet-white skin to the near-black understorey, the classical pose smuggled into a snapshot’s informality. Look long enough and the twins stop being provocative and become almost heraldic, two figures propped on the rings of a tree that counted more summers than they have.
By the early nineties Weber had turned the Adirondack woods into a national daydream, and this is what it looked like from behind: two blond twins, naked, balanced on the sawn crown of a felled log whose growth rings fan out beneath their heels. The decade wanted its bodies clean, athletic, faintly mythological, and the Brewer twins oblige without appearing to try. They could be a single figure caught between two mirrors, or a woodland deity that budded and forgot to split.
What keeps the picture from tipping into kitsch is the log itself, an unglamorous slab of dead tree with cracks radiating from its centre like a target. On this rough pedestal the twins stand with the unbothered symmetry of siblings who have shared a bathroom their whole lives. One hand rests on a hip; the ferns behind them dissolve into a wall of soft grey-black. There is comedy in it, and tenderness, and the absurdity of asking two teenagers to impersonate Eden while the mosquitoes feast.
Weber, who defined American fashion in the 1980s and never stopped photographing the Adirondacks as if they were the last honest place, made a whole genre out of the male nude at ease in nature. This gelatin silver print is where his instincts converge: the tonal reach from wet-white skin to the near-black understorey, the classical pose smuggled into a snapshot’s informality. Look long enough and the twins stop being provocative and become almost heraldic, two figures propped on the rings of a tree that counted more summers than they have.