Overexposure is a kind of confession: it admits that a photograph is made of light before a face, and here the pale frizzed curls piled on the head burn almost to blank paper. The brightness is pushed until the netted filaments of hair dissolve into the soft gray backdrop and lose their edges. Out of that near-whiteness a young face resolves, dark-lashed eyes fixed on us, one finger raised to the parted lips, the bare shoulders falling into shadow. The picture tests how much brightness a portrait can absorb before it stops describing and begins to glow.
The gesture at the center is a small, tactile thing: a fingertip pressed to the mouth, childlike, a little sly, the knuckles catching the only firm modelling in an otherwise weightless field. Everything else is texture rendered as luminosity, the sugared tangle of curls threaded through with what looks like tulle, so that hairdressing itself becomes the subject. Meisel is quoting an old studio glamour, the powdered, pin-curled portraiture of an earlier age, and pushing its whiteness past plausibility toward apparition.
The sitter is Nadja Auermann, and the portrait belongs to Meisel’s long project of remaking each model into a creature of a chosen decade. He photographed every Vogue Italia cover from 1988 to 2015, a master of pastiche fluent in any studio manner. As a physical print the image lives by its whites, a sheet that must hold that vast pale expanse without flattening, keeping the faint filaments legible and the eyes alive within the glare. Handled, it stays an object about the fragile line between a face and pure light.
Overexposure is a kind of confession: it admits that a photograph is made of light before a face, and here the pale frizzed curls piled on the head burn almost to blank paper. The brightness is pushed until the netted filaments of hair dissolve into the soft gray backdrop and lose their edges. Out of that near-whiteness a young face resolves, dark-lashed eyes fixed on us, one finger raised to the parted lips, the bare shoulders falling into shadow. The picture tests how much brightness a portrait can absorb before it stops describing and begins to glow.
The gesture at the center is a small, tactile thing: a fingertip pressed to the mouth, childlike, a little sly, the knuckles catching the only firm modelling in an otherwise weightless field. Everything else is texture rendered as luminosity, the sugared tangle of curls threaded through with what looks like tulle, so that hairdressing itself becomes the subject. Meisel is quoting an old studio glamour, the powdered, pin-curled portraiture of an earlier age, and pushing its whiteness past plausibility toward apparition.
The sitter is Nadja Auermann, and the portrait belongs to Meisel’s long project of remaking each model into a creature of a chosen decade. He photographed every Vogue Italia cover from 1988 to 2015, a master of pastiche fluent in any studio manner. As a physical print the image lives by its whites, a sheet that must hold that vast pale expanse without flattening, keeping the faint filaments legible and the eyes alive within the glare. Handled, it stays an object about the fragile line between a face and pure light.