Steven Meisel

An empty dock at night, an apron of asphalt ruled by a painted yellow line, and someone has set two black folding chairs down in the middle. On them sit a woman in a black jacket cut low to the waist and a bare figure wearing nothing but patent heels and a cigarette. Behind them a harbor burns orange, cranes and tanks strung with lights; in front, the two bodies are lit a cool green, so figures and world belong to different temperatures. The placement is deliberate, and absurd.

The picture is organized as a frontal double portrait, the oldest studio arrangement, dropped into a place with no studio. Two chairs, two crossed pairs of legs, four heels on grit; the composition is nearly symmetrical, the yellow line running beneath both like a baseline. What complicates it is the light: the green wash flattens the skin to statue-like whiteness, while the warm background stays specific, and the seam between exposures is where the strangeness lives. It is a document of a fiction, made with a documentarian’s care for edges and ground.

Meisel, who photographed every Vogue Italia cover across a quarter-century, used fashion to argue about sex and image, and this pairing, dressed and undressed, composed and exposed, is one such. He gives glamour a hard floor to sit on and lets the contradiction stand. As an archival pigment print the colour stays saturated, orange harbor and green flesh at full strength, the blacks of jacket, chairs and shadow deep. What it offers is composure in an unlikely place, two people at ease at the edge of the working world.