Bruce Weber American, b. 29/3/1946

A naked man seen from behind, his arms laid along the neck and rump of a dark horse that has lowered its head to graze. His hair is curly and damp; the horse's mane hangs in long wet strands. Behind them a wall of summer trees goes soft and gray. He is not riding the animal and not restraining it. He is leaning on it, the way one leans on a fence, and the horse, indifferent, keeps eating.

Weber called him a guy named “special,” with the quotation marks intact, and the title is a small confession about how these pictures are made: a person becomes a type, the type becomes an image, and the image outlives everyone's name. Old Westbury is old money, the estates of the North Shore, and the nude in the paddock belongs to a long line of pastoral fictions in which the body is returned to nature and nature is a well-kept lawn. The photograph knows this and does not apologize for it.

What saves it from prettiness is the horse. An animal cannot pose, and its refusal to participate gives the man's pose its meaning. He is all surface, all offered back and flank; the horse is all appetite. Photography, which turns everything it touches into a possession, here records something that cannot be possessed: the ordinary hunger of a creature in grass, and a man who has decided, for the length of an exposure, to be as unselfconscious as that.