Steven Meisel American, b. 5/06/1954

Gold here is less a colour than a tense. The satin pours down her body and gathers light in long liquid seams; the beaded cap sits low on the brow with its little veil of dark rings, and one pale feather stands straight up out of it, absurd and heraldic. She holds a coupe at the height of her mouth without drinking from it. Behind her the banquette is a hard vermilion, and the table has already been used: plates disturbed, knives laid down, a glass at the edge of the frame.

Everything is in the pose, and the pose is a refusal. She reclines rather than sits, sliding along the leather while her face turns away from the table and from whoever is still at it. The dress belongs to one decade and the photograph to another, so the image carries two dates at once, the date of the costume and the date of the exposure, and asks us to read the gap between them. This is the ordinary strangeness of fashion photography: it dresses the present as the past, then prints it as evidence.

Meisel is the medium's great ventriloquist, able to speak any style in its own accent, and here he speaks the society portrait and the cinema without quoting either outright. The archival pigment print serves the conceit exactly: it holds the satin's highlights without burning them, keeps the leather matte against all that sheen, and lets the dulled silver on the table stay quiet. The champagne never reaches her lips. The picture keeps her in the pause before the sip, which is the only tense a photograph has ever really owned.