One oval of borrowed light has come to rest on her mouth, neat as a beauty spot in negative. Once you see it you see what it belongs to: a whole weather system of bright dots thrown across her face and dress by the sun firing through the perforated chair she holds above her shoulders, hundreds of small suns from a piece of furniture you would otherwise find in a municipal waiting room.
The dress, meanwhile, is conducting its own argument about dots: big black ones printed at confident intervals, and, down at the hem, the whole scheme reversed, white on black, as if the pattern had a lining of its own opposite. So there are three populations of circles here, printed, projected and punched, and none of them agree. The printed dots are permanent opinions; the light dots are facts that will be gone in a minute; the holes in the chair are the machinery producing them. I found myself thinking of op art, of Kusama, of colanders at noon, and then of how rarely a photograph lets an ordinary chair do something this glorious. She, holding it all up, looks at the camera as though none of it were remotely funny, which of course makes it funnier.
The photographer is Barcelona’s great export to the fashion glossies, and the elemental forces that run through his work, fire, water, wind, are joined here by the humblest of them all, sunlight through holes. In this black-and-white archival pigment print the dots stay crisp from velvet black to paper white, a small optical machine that never stops running.
One oval of borrowed light has come to rest on her mouth, neat as a beauty spot in negative. Once you see it you see what it belongs to: a whole weather system of bright dots thrown across her face and dress by the sun firing through the perforated chair she holds above her shoulders, hundreds of small suns from a piece of furniture you would otherwise find in a municipal waiting room.
The dress, meanwhile, is conducting its own argument about dots: big black ones printed at confident intervals, and, down at the hem, the whole scheme reversed, white on black, as if the pattern had a lining of its own opposite. So there are three populations of circles here, printed, projected and punched, and none of them agree. The printed dots are permanent opinions; the light dots are facts that will be gone in a minute; the holes in the chair are the machinery producing them. I found myself thinking of op art, of Kusama, of colanders at noon, and then of how rarely a photograph lets an ordinary chair do something this glorious. She, holding it all up, looks at the camera as though none of it were remotely funny, which of course makes it funnier.
The photographer is Barcelona’s great export to the fashion glossies, and the elemental forces that run through his work, fire, water, wind, are joined here by the humblest of them all, sunlight through holes. In this black-and-white archival pigment print the dots stay crisp from velvet black to paper white, a small optical machine that never stops running.