It is the hair that gives the game away. Everything below the jaw could be a Greek bronze, or a physique-magazine ideal, or one of those anonymous studio nudes the nineteenth century pretended were about anatomy; but the hair has been combed into a glossy pompadour with a wave at the front, and suddenly the young man is not a statue at all but a specific American boy dressed, from the neck up, for a date. The title, drily, calls him a gentleman.
What is a gentleman, after all, but a man defined by his tailoring, and here the tailoring has been subtracted entirely, leaving only the posture that once came with it, the three-quarter turn, the hand set at the hip, the level appraising glance over the shoulder. Weber has borrowed the whole grammar of the society portrait and then photographed a nude standing inside it. The black ground helps the theft; it is exactly the void behind a Gainsborough, drained of its velvet and its dog.
This is Weber’s lifelong subject, of course, the male body idealized without apology and lit like a cathedral, desire smuggled in under the cover of classicism and good humour. Nobody did it with a straighter face. The gelatin silver print is what makes the muscles legible as sculpture, its long grey scale modelling the shoulder and flank in light while the background goes to pure black. Printed by hand, it has the density of an object worth the pompous title, and knows it.
It is the hair that gives the game away. Everything below the jaw could be a Greek bronze, or a physique-magazine ideal, or one of those anonymous studio nudes the nineteenth century pretended were about anatomy; but the hair has been combed into a glossy pompadour with a wave at the front, and suddenly the young man is not a statue at all but a specific American boy dressed, from the neck up, for a date. The title, drily, calls him a gentleman.
What is a gentleman, after all, but a man defined by his tailoring, and here the tailoring has been subtracted entirely, leaving only the posture that once came with it, the three-quarter turn, the hand set at the hip, the level appraising glance over the shoulder. Weber has borrowed the whole grammar of the society portrait and then photographed a nude standing inside it. The black ground helps the theft; it is exactly the void behind a Gainsborough, drained of its velvet and its dog.
This is Weber’s lifelong subject, of course, the male body idealized without apology and lit like a cathedral, desire smuggled in under the cover of classicism and good humour. Nobody did it with a straighter face. The gelatin silver print is what makes the muscles legible as sculpture, its long grey scale modelling the shoulder and flank in light while the background goes to pure black. Printed by hand, it has the density of an object worth the pompous title, and knows it.