A moment ago, you feel, he was moving, parting the pine boughs with a shoulder, and a moment from now he will be gone, deeper into the tree. Weber has caught the pause between, the half-second in which he holds still among the needles and looks back at whoever is looking in. Branches cross his face; a bright twig hangs before his mouth; his damp curls take what light filters through the canopy. He has the wary, amused stillness of an animal that has decided not to bolt.
There is something comic and entirely serious about the setup, as there always is when a beautiful person is discovered pretending to be a woodland creature. And yet it works, because he is not quite performing. The direct gaze does most of it; everything else, the soft pine, the folded arms below, the blur that swallows the edges, conspires to keep only the eyes in focus. You end up in a small staring contest with a stranger in a tree, and, oddly, you are the one who feels found out.
Weber built a whole American mythology out of encounters like this in the 1980s, boys and dogs and forests, the sense that Eden was somewhere upstate and lately vacated. What lifts this one above the genre is its softness, the shallow focus that makes the picture feel remembered rather than taken. It is a gelatin silver print, and the silver is generous with the greys, letting the needles dissolve into smoke while the face stays solid. I have looked several times and still cannot decide who is hiding from whom.
A moment ago, you feel, he was moving, parting the pine boughs with a shoulder, and a moment from now he will be gone, deeper into the tree. Weber has caught the pause between, the half-second in which he holds still among the needles and looks back at whoever is looking in. Branches cross his face; a bright twig hangs before his mouth; his damp curls take what light filters through the canopy. He has the wary, amused stillness of an animal that has decided not to bolt.
There is something comic and entirely serious about the setup, as there always is when a beautiful person is discovered pretending to be a woodland creature. And yet it works, because he is not quite performing. The direct gaze does most of it; everything else, the soft pine, the folded arms below, the blur that swallows the edges, conspires to keep only the eyes in focus. You end up in a small staring contest with a stranger in a tree, and, oddly, you are the one who feels found out.
Weber built a whole American mythology out of encounters like this in the 1980s, boys and dogs and forests, the sense that Eden was somewhere upstate and lately vacated. What lifts this one above the genre is its softness, the shallow focus that makes the picture feel remembered rather than taken. It is a gelatin silver print, and the silver is generous with the greys, letting the needles dissolve into smoke while the face stays solid. I have looked several times and still cannot decide who is hiding from whom.