The picture keeps its story to itself. We are shown the aftermath of something, a room in which two people have stopped speaking, but the words, the cause, the scenes before and after are withheld. A woman reclines against a carved wooden headboard in a red off-the-shoulder dress, bare legs folded, her bouffant immaculate, her gaze aimed at nothing. A man slumps across the room in a white shirt and loosened tie, looking at the floor. Between them a green telephone waits on the nightstand for a call that already came.
Meisel builds the image as a film still for a film that does not exist. Everything is period, everything quotation: ochre walls flecked with light from a beaded lamp, the saturated colour of early-Sixties melodrama, a composition that pushes the couple to opposite edges so the empty middle carries the tension. Photography has envied cinema’s before and after, and here it makes a virtue of having neither. A single frame is asked to imply a whole reel, and does, by refusing to resolve who has wronged whom.
Meisel, who photographed every Vogue Italia cover across a quarter-century, is the supreme pasticheur, able to reconstruct any studio idiom and bend it to narrative. Here the styling nods to Sirk and European art cinema, letting the viewer supply the plot. As an archival pigment print the colour holds its cinematic warmth, the reds and ochres deep, the shadows loaded. What sells the image is what it will not tell: the unbearable quiet of two people in one room, and the sense that we walked in a moment too late.
The picture keeps its story to itself. We are shown the aftermath of something, a room in which two people have stopped speaking, but the words, the cause, the scenes before and after are withheld. A woman reclines against a carved wooden headboard in a red off-the-shoulder dress, bare legs folded, her bouffant immaculate, her gaze aimed at nothing. A man slumps across the room in a white shirt and loosened tie, looking at the floor. Between them a green telephone waits on the nightstand for a call that already came.
Meisel builds the image as a film still for a film that does not exist. Everything is period, everything quotation: ochre walls flecked with light from a beaded lamp, the saturated colour of early-Sixties melodrama, a composition that pushes the couple to opposite edges so the empty middle carries the tension. Photography has envied cinema’s before and after, and here it makes a virtue of having neither. A single frame is asked to imply a whole reel, and does, by refusing to resolve who has wronged whom.
Meisel, who photographed every Vogue Italia cover across a quarter-century, is the supreme pasticheur, able to reconstruct any studio idiom and bend it to narrative. Here the styling nods to Sirk and European art cinema, letting the viewer supply the plot. As an archival pigment print the colour holds its cinematic warmth, the reds and ochres deep, the shadows loaded. What sells the image is what it will not tell: the unbearable quiet of two people in one room, and the sense that we walked in a moment too late.