A second ago, perhaps, her eyes were open; a second from now they will be again. Weber has taken the in-between, the private lull when a face stops performing and simply rests, and made a portrait out of it. Isabella Rossellini stands against a plain pale ground in a black velvet jacket with big, architectural shoulders, arms folded across herself as if she has just felt a draught, her spiky dark hair still holding the energy of some movement just past. The eyes are closed. Everything in the picture waits with her.
It is an oddly generous thing to photograph, this shut-eyed pause, because it hands us the one moment a professional beauty is not looking back. She could be listening to music we cannot hear, or to nothing at all. The folded arms complicate the glamour with something protective, almost bashful, as though the fabulous jacket were borrowed, and soon to be reclaimed. The deep V of the lapels plunges toward the sternum, but the mood is not seduction so much as self-possession caught off duty.
Weber made this in the year his black-and-white had become the house style of a decade of American fashion, yet the picture keeps almost none of that noise. It is a gelatin silver print, and the process earns its keep: the velvet goes to a deep, bottomless black, the ground floats to near-white, and the only true greys are saved for the skin of face and throat, which is exactly where you are meant to look. For the length of one breath, the camera’s favourite subject has simply stopped looking.
A second ago, perhaps, her eyes were open; a second from now they will be again. Weber has taken the in-between, the private lull when a face stops performing and simply rests, and made a portrait out of it. Isabella Rossellini stands against a plain pale ground in a black velvet jacket with big, architectural shoulders, arms folded across herself as if she has just felt a draught, her spiky dark hair still holding the energy of some movement just past. The eyes are closed. Everything in the picture waits with her.
It is an oddly generous thing to photograph, this shut-eyed pause, because it hands us the one moment a professional beauty is not looking back. She could be listening to music we cannot hear, or to nothing at all. The folded arms complicate the glamour with something protective, almost bashful, as though the fabulous jacket were borrowed, and soon to be reclaimed. The deep V of the lapels plunges toward the sternum, but the mood is not seduction so much as self-possession caught off duty.
Weber made this in the year his black-and-white had become the house style of a decade of American fashion, yet the picture keeps almost none of that noise. It is a gelatin silver print, and the process earns its keep: the velvet goes to a deep, bottomless black, the ground floats to near-white, and the only true greys are saved for the skin of face and throat, which is exactly where you are meant to look. For the length of one breath, the camera’s favourite subject has simply stopped looking.