Bruce Weber American, b. 29/3/1946

An old man sits in a bentwood chair beside a tall white plinth, in a room with shuttered windows and a great deal of light coming through them. White shirt, sleeves rolled, braces, pale trousers. His right hand has gone up to his forehead and stopped there, and his eyes are shut. The left hand rests on the chair arm holding a small cube of something. On the plinth beside him stands a plaster bust of a bearded classical head in a pushed-back helmet, chipped along one shoulder and broken off at the chest.

Two heads, and neither of them is looking. The bust has its face turned down and away, the way those things always do, and the man beside it has closed his eyes against the window. The room is full of Roman daylight and nobody in it is using any of it.

Weber photographed a great many famous people and this is one of the quieter results. Twombly is not performing being a painter. He is sitting in a chair on a hot afternoon with a hand over his eyes. What the photograph does is set him at exactly the height of the antique head, in the same light, with the same broken edges showing, and then decline to say anything further about it. One of them was made to last. The other is having a rest.