Joel Meyerowitz American, b. 6/3/1938

A young man with slicked-back hair and a dark sweater holds a baby against his cheek, his eyes lowered almost shut, his mouth pressed to the child's face. The baby, in a white knitted cardigan and wrapped in a pale blue blanket, stares straight into the lens with round dark eyes and a small pursed mouth. The man's hand, broad and weathered, spreads across the blanket to hold the bundle in place. Behind them, out of focus, an older balding man in a navy jacket leans on a railing, raises a cigarette to his lips and looks out over a dusty street. Dark clothes hang at the right edge; a whitewashed wall and a stone pillar close the space.

The two men face in opposite directions, and between them they divide the picture into two ways of being a man. The one in the background has turned towards the street, towards the world and its business, keeping his face to himself. The one in the foreground has turned inwards, towards the child, and his face is entirely given over to it. Only the baby looks at us.

I keep returning to the young man's closed eyes. He is not performing tenderness for the camera; he seems hardly aware of it, and that is what makes the picture so intimate. Men are so often photographed doing, and so rarely photographed feeling, that the sight of this one surrendering to a baby's cheek has something almost private about it. The child has not yet learned to look away, or to look like anything, and so meets the stranger's lens as an equal. Between the man who shuts his eyes and the man who watches the street, the baby is the only one who sees who is there.