Bruce Weber American, b. 29/3/1946

The figure occupies perhaps a fortieth of the frame: a pale body dropping through the dark mass of the trees, arms flung back, legs together, still holding the shape of the swing that let it go. Everything else is landscape. A bank of pines, one white cumulus in the upper left, a birch trunk fallen at a long diagonal, and along the bottom edge a narrow strip of black water. Above him the rope is still visible, going slack.

What the exposure gives is a fact about time, that he is neither on the rope nor in the pond, and what it withholds is the thing we actually want, which is the sound. This is a picture of a noise we have to supply ourselves: the creak of the branch taking the weight, the shout, the hit. Photography's silence is usually described as a loss. Here it is the entire design, because the water stays perfectly still inside a frame that shows a body about to break it.

Weber made it during the Bear Pond summers, work read since as advertising, as homoerotic idyll, as American pastoral, and it holds all three partly because it borrows the amateur's grammar wholesale: the far-off subject, the too-much sky, the framing of a snapshot taken by a friend from the shore. The gelatin silver print keeps the summer greens as dense greys and leaves the boy the brightest thing in the picture, so the eye finds him before it knows what it has found.