The black netting slips down over his eyes and halts at the bridge of the nose, drawing a shadow across the gaze it hides. I keep trying to meet those eyes and the mesh sends me back. Above, a sculpture of stiffened horsehair loops and unfurls in great dark ribbons, rising off the crown of teased curls like smoke deciding to hold a shape. He is bare to the shoulders; the studio behind him is an even, breathing grey, without incident. Everything conspires toward theatre, toward the mask.
And yet what holds me is not the extravagant crown but the thin chain at his throat, and the small round pendant resting just where the sternum begins. It is nothing, a trinket, domestic, off-duty; it belongs to a life that has neither veil nor horsehair. The parted lips, the faint stubble along the jaw, the collarbone catching a soft light: these plain facts of a body keep leaking through the costume. The image wants to be a fantasy and the pendant refuses, tugging it back toward the person underneath.
Photographed in Prague, the portrait belongs to this photographer’s long study of the beautiful young man, from Adirondack athletes to sun-warmed nudes, here turned baroque. The gelatin silver print gives the mesh its two lives at once: the crisp black armature of the crin and, over the eyes, a grey so fine you read the weave thread by thread. Continuous tone, developed by hand, it lets the veil stay half-transparent forever, the way it was in the second the shutter closed. I look, and am kept out, and cannot stop looking.
The black netting slips down over his eyes and halts at the bridge of the nose, drawing a shadow across the gaze it hides. I keep trying to meet those eyes and the mesh sends me back. Above, a sculpture of stiffened horsehair loops and unfurls in great dark ribbons, rising off the crown of teased curls like smoke deciding to hold a shape. He is bare to the shoulders; the studio behind him is an even, breathing grey, without incident. Everything conspires toward theatre, toward the mask.
And yet what holds me is not the extravagant crown but the thin chain at his throat, and the small round pendant resting just where the sternum begins. It is nothing, a trinket, domestic, off-duty; it belongs to a life that has neither veil nor horsehair. The parted lips, the faint stubble along the jaw, the collarbone catching a soft light: these plain facts of a body keep leaking through the costume. The image wants to be a fantasy and the pendant refuses, tugging it back toward the person underneath.
Photographed in Prague, the portrait belongs to this photographer’s long study of the beautiful young man, from Adirondack athletes to sun-warmed nudes, here turned baroque. The gelatin silver print gives the mesh its two lives at once: the crisp black armature of the crin and, over the eyes, a grey so fine you read the weave thread by thread. Continuous tone, developed by hand, it lets the veil stay half-transparent forever, the way it was in the second the shutter closed. I look, and am kept out, and cannot stop looking.