Steven Meisel American, b. 5/06/1954

Green upon green: the mossy nap of a velvet sofa gone bald in patches, the oxidized green of scarred plaster, the dull gleam of a leather skirt taking what little light the room allows. It is the palette of an old painting darkened by varnish, and the light behaves accordingly, bronzing a shoulder, a knee, the long ridge of a shin, and letting everything else fall toward shadow.

The pose is older than photography. A woman reclines on a couch, one arm raised, her gaze leveled at the camera: the odalisque, carried from Venetian painting into the fashion magazine, where it acquired knee-high stockings, sheer black sleeves, and crocodile heels. Meisel sets the inheritance in a ruined parlor. The sofa's back is stripped to burlap and horsehair, the walls scribbled and gouged, and luxury, posed amid collapse, is flattered by it; the dress grows sharper against the decay.

I keep returning to the stuffing, erupting along the sofa's crest like an untrimmed hedge: a thing built for comfort, exhausted by use, still holding the body it was made to hold. There is a politics in who may lounge in a ruin and find it beautiful, and the photograph understands this without saying it — in New York, in 2002, on a couch dying more slowly than fashion moves.