Bruce Weber American, b. 29/3/1946

He leans against the fender of a big convertible with a rag in one hand and a cigarette in the other, bare-chested, in printed swim shorts, white socks and black shoes. The plate reads CALIFORNIA OOS 019. Behind him a strip of low buildings, parked cars, a hillside; beside him a wooden bottle rack, and at his feet a heap of rags. The body is a fifties body — chest hair, thick shoulders, no gym gloss on it anywhere.

The picture arrives just as Weber is inventing the eighties. Everything in it is a quotation: the physique magazines, the beefcake calendar, the car-wash pin-up, replayed straight and printed rich, with none of the wink a lesser photographer would have used to stay safe. That refusal to wink is the engine of the whole advertising era he was about to build, and it is already running at full power here.

The title says the sitter belongs to a canoe club in Waikiki, and the picture puts him, without comment, on a dusty American roadside with a bucket. That gap between what a man is called and where he is found is Weber's most dependable joke and his most dependable tenderness. He is being photographed as a type, and he is looking off to the side like somebody with an actual afternoon to get on with.