Steven Meisel

A moment more and one of those pale wisteria strands, already trailing past her jaw, will slip and fall; for now it holds, and so does she. The picture catches an equilibrium that cannot last, a small mountain of cut flowers balanced on a human head with gravity politely deferred. The interesting question is a formal one: how such extravagance is kept from collapse. The answer is the face, held level and centred, a fixed point around which the blooming disorder organises itself.

The construction rewards a slow inventory. A large pink peony sits at the crown; a spotted orchid hangs on the brow like a pendant; cream and mauve roses, blue hydrangea, and lengths of wisteria fill and spill from the sides. Against this the woman is nearly plain, green eyes, bronzed skin, a bare shoulder turned to the foreground and softly lit. The flat grey ground refuses to compete. Every colour is up in the flowers; every structural certainty down in the calm geometry of eyes, nose, mouth.

This is Steven Meisel building a portrait as a piece of architecture, the fashion headdress descended from the powdered wig by way of a florist. He has photographed the reigning models of four decades, this one among them, and treats the face less as personality than as the plane that steadies the design. The archival pigment print suits the task, holding the gradations from cream to violet to sky-blue without letting the pastels turn to mush, the grey ground kept even and quiet. A picture about balance, printed so that nothing tips.