Bruce Weber American, b. 29/3/1946

The head fills the frame at a three-quarter turn, cropped so that one ear sits hard against the left edge and the far cheek runs off the right. The hair has been lifted into wet dark spikes; the jaw carries two days of stubble; the mouth is open just enough to show the lower teeth. Behind him there is only a pale, even ground. He looks past me and slightly down, and the expression is neither friendly nor hostile, the face of someone waiting for the next thing to happen.

The studium is legible at once: a young American boxer, photographed close, in the manner of a training-camp portrait that has wandered into a studio. I read the type easily, the cropped sides, the set of the mouth, the bare shoulder at the bottom edge, and reading it gives me the mild, informed pleasure such pictures are built to give. Weber has kept everything else out, so the type is all the frame proposes.

And then I see the bruise. Under the near eye there is a dark bloom, soft-edged, the tone of a thumbprint left in the silver, and it undoes the arrangement. Nobody styled it. It tells me that this face was struck, at an hour I cannot know, by someone I will never see, and that the camera arrived a few days after. That small wound is what pierces me, and what I keep, long after the handsomeness has stopped being interesting.