The face is missing, lifted clean out of the top of the frame, and in its place we are handed a torso stippled all over with the shadow of leaves, a body half-dissolving into the hedge behind it. The refusal is the whole idea. Denied the usual anchor of a face, the eye has nowhere to go but across the skin, following the branching shadow as it maps the ribs, pools briefly in the navel, and slides down toward the hip.
There is something faintly comic in how thoroughly the camouflage works: a young man standing in dappled sun, arms up, becomes indistinguishable from the shrubbery, as if the surest way to photograph a nude were to hide him in plain sight. The dappling is doing what a fig leaf used to do, except everywhere at once. And because we cannot read an expression, we cannot tell whether he is posing, stretching, or simply enjoying the warmth, which leaves the picture pleasantly, deliberately unresolved.
This is the pastoral, sun-and-skin key that made the photographer the defining eye of 1980s American fashion, though here he pushes it almost to abstraction, closer to a study of light on a surface than to a portrait of anyone. The gelatin silver print is what carries it: the leaf-shadows need a long, supple grey scale to stay legible as shadow rather than dirt, and the print delivers exactly that gradation. In the end the picture keeps its secret and hands you the weather instead, which turns out to be the better gift.
The face is missing, lifted clean out of the top of the frame, and in its place we are handed a torso stippled all over with the shadow of leaves, a body half-dissolving into the hedge behind it. The refusal is the whole idea. Denied the usual anchor of a face, the eye has nowhere to go but across the skin, following the branching shadow as it maps the ribs, pools briefly in the navel, and slides down toward the hip.
There is something faintly comic in how thoroughly the camouflage works: a young man standing in dappled sun, arms up, becomes indistinguishable from the shrubbery, as if the surest way to photograph a nude were to hide him in plain sight. The dappling is doing what a fig leaf used to do, except everywhere at once. And because we cannot read an expression, we cannot tell whether he is posing, stretching, or simply enjoying the warmth, which leaves the picture pleasantly, deliberately unresolved.
This is the pastoral, sun-and-skin key that made the photographer the defining eye of 1980s American fashion, though here he pushes it almost to abstraction, closer to a study of light on a surface than to a portrait of anyone. The gelatin silver print is what carries it: the leaf-shadows need a long, supple grey scale to stay legible as shadow rather than dirt, and the print delivers exactly that gradation. In the end the picture keeps its secret and hands you the weather instead, which turns out to be the better gift.