Bruce Weber American, b. 29/3/1946

A man in a white crocheted tank top, naked from the waist down, leans into the mirrored door of a painted armoire until his face nearly meets its double. Both palms are flat on the glass. His eyes are closed. Behind him a wall of louvered shutters holds the Florida light in bars; beneath his bare feet a rug of concentric circles spreads across the tile, and a scroll of carved waves runs along the base of the cabinet like a frieze on a tomb.

Golden Beach, 1990, the house where Weber made so much of his work, and yet this is not a picture of a house. It is a picture of a man alone with the fact of himself. The mesh shirt is the joke and the tell: it covers nothing, it is fishnet in daylight, a garment that exists only to be seen through. What the mirror gives back is not vanity but something closer to solace, a body checking that it is still there, still wanted, still his.

I think of the men in Weber's pictures who look out at us with the easy confidence of the chosen, and then I think of Ric, who looks only at Ric. The photograph is quiet about it. The muscle is there, the light is there, the sculpted calf and the heel lifted off the floor, but the emotion is private and the camera, for once, is not invited. It stands behind him and waits, the way you wait for someone to finish a thought they will never say aloud.