Steven Meisel

A hand rises to the face, two fingers scissoring a slim cigarette, and the whole photograph arranges itself around that small deliberate act. Meisel's profile of Kristen McMenamy is built from angles: the bowed head, the arm cocked against the hip, the elbow thrust into empty sky. What might have been a portrait becomes instead a study in the geometry a body can make when it knows it is being watched.

The light is the flat, even light of an overcast afternoon, and it describes everything with the same courtesy — the lacquered sweep of hair, the drawn black eye, the ruched silk of the dress, a distant lamp hanging out of focus like a second moon. Photography's oldest trick is to make description feel like meaning, and here the description is so exact that the woman turns nearly architectural, a column with a pulse.

Yet the picture is not cold. The lowered eye and parted lips admit a privacy the pose cannot quite conceal, as though the model had drifted for one frame out of performance and into thought. Meisel, working in 1994, reaches back to the grand manner of midcentury fashion photography and finds it still serviceable. Elegance, this print argues, is a discipline of edges, and every edge here is kept honest.