Steven Meisel American, b. 5/06/1954

Two faces in profile, so close to the lens and to each other that the frame holds almost nothing else. The upper lip of one is a hair's breadth from the lower lip of the other. Both sets of eyes are closed, the lashes precise, the hair cropped and wet, the shoulders beaded with water. Each rests a hand on the other's shoulder, fingers loose, the long pale nails catching light. The tonal range runs from the near-white of one cheek to the deep warm brown of the other, and the greys of wet skin carry everything between.

It is not a kiss. It is the instant before or just after one, which is a different and more difficult thing to photograph, since it has no event in it, only proximity. Nothing narrates: no room, no water's edge, no clothing, no occasion. Two women rest against each other after swimming, and the picture declines to say whether what we are seeing is desire, friendship, exhaustion, or a photographer's instruction, and refuses in a way that feels like tact rather than evasion.

I keep returning to the hands. They are the only part of the image that is doing anything, and what they do is small: hold on, lightly. A magazine in 1989 could publish a white face and a Black face at that scale, touching, and call it beauty, and the history of who has been permitted to be beautiful together, and in whose pages, sits just outside the frame. The photograph cannot resolve that history. It can hold two people in the same light, which is not nothing.