Steven Meisel American, b. 5/06/1954

The image is drowning in light. A figure in three-quarter view, hair blowing loose and gold, holds a coral-red mohair sweater bunched around her upper body with both arms; below, a pale pink ruffled brief. A ring on one finger. The background is not a background at all but an even wash of blown-out cream, and the whole frame carries a warm haze that softens every edge and eats the highlights entirely.

What we are looking at is largely a record of the light's behaviour rather than of the scene. Flare of this kind is an event inside the lens: light bouncing between glass elements, veiling the shadows, spreading the highlights past their own borders. For most of photography's history it was a fault to be suppressed, coated against, hidden — and here it has been courted, because it produces exactly the atmosphere a garment advertisement wants and no arrangement of props could supply.

The mohair is what survives. Its loops and haloed fibres are the one thing in the picture the haze cannot dissolve, and they hold their texture right at the point where the face is already going. That is a fair description of the medium's stubbornness: reduce a photograph almost to nothing and it will still hand you the weave of a sweater. The wool is more legible here than the woman, and the picture appears to know it.