Steven Meisel American, b. 5/06/1954

A woman stands full length against a plain pale ground, lit so evenly that the floor and the wall behind her have dissolved into one another. The gown is pale and asymmetric: a diagonal panel falls from one shoulder across the body to below the knee, over a long column to the floor. Her hair is teased up into a tall bouffant. A jewelled starfish is pinned at the shoulder, a jewelled cuff sits high on one forearm, bracelets on the other wrist. Her right hand has come up towards her chin without quite arriving.

Everything here says 1961 and the photograph was made in 2011. The hair, the eye make-up, the cut of the dress, the flat studio ground, the black and white: all of it is correct, and correct is the point. A period pastiche that got one detail wrong would be a joke. This one gets nothing wrong, which leaves you looking at an image with no tell in it anywhere, and wondering a little about all the images that really were made in 1961.

The hand is where it stops being a reconstruction. It is raised and open and not doing anything, hovering short of the face, caught in the half second before a gesture decides what it is going to be. Every other element in the frame was settled in advance. That hand was not. Meisel could have had her touch her chin and the picture would have closed like a book. He let it float, and the whole careful forgery is held open by four fingers that have not made up their mind.