Curt Butrum and David Moore, Brookville, New York, 1987.The pool has been drained for some time. Its walls are blotched with damp, a ladder with white rungs climbs the back wall towards an empty outlet, and dead leaves have gathered where the water used…
Sean Bohary, Brookville, Long Island, for Azzedine Alaia, 1987.A rococo chaise longue, carved white and gilt, crested with roses, its striped mattress worn, has been carried out into a rough field and set down in the uncut grass.
Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell, Los Angeles, 1989.Two faces in profile, so close to the lens and to each other that the frame holds almost nothing else.
Christy Turlington, New York, 1989.A diamond starburst clamped between her teeth, marquise stones biting back at her lower lip: Christy Turlington decides, in 1989, that jewelry is something you devour.
Naomi Campbell, Coney Island, 1989.Naomi Campbell, Coney Island is, before anything else, a photograph of a film being made.
Claudia Schiffer, New York, 1990.Steven Meisel shot this in 1990, dead center of the moment fashion stopped selling clothes and started minting goddesses — and Claudia Schiffer, all of twenty, was the face the decade wanted.
Linda Evangelista, New York, 1990.She has her back half to the avenue and her chin thrown the other way, mouth parted, and the whole picture seems to swing on that single thin hoop swaying at her ear.
Linda Evangelista, New York, 1990.Wet wood, first of all — the deep lacquered grain of the surface goes slick and reflective where the water has run over it, the figured panel catching the light in long smeared streaks.
Tony Ward, New York, 1990.There's a whole genealogy of male poses folded into this 1990 picture, and Steven Meisel knew every one of them.
Naomi Campbell, Paris, 1991.Begin with the symmetry. Campbell stands frontal, legs driven apart into a wide inverted V, both arms folded behind her head so the elbows answer each other like the points of a compass.
Linda Evangelista and Kristen McMenamy, L'Haÿ-les-Roses, France, 1992.A gravel allée in a formal French garden, clipped box parterres and cone topiary ranged along one side, a great house closing the view at the end.
Nadja Auermann, Ward Pound Ridge, New York, 1992.She gives the camera everything and nothing.
Shalom Harlow, New York, 1992.Shalom Harlow appears suspended between breath and stillness, a young woman caught in the quiet eye of New York’s early‑nineties storm.
Carla Bruni, Paris, 1993.Brigitte Bardot kept getting into the room before Carla Bruni did.
Kristen McMenamy, Paris, 1993.A gilded salon at the Ritz, panelled in pale grey-blue boiserie, the kind of room that exists to confer status on whoever enters it.
Stella Tennant, London, 1993.She has pulled the mohair sleeves all the way up over both hands, so that the sweater becomes a pair of soft paws cradling her own face — and the whole picture turns on that gesture, half…
Bridget Hall, New York, 1994.There is no room here, only the studio's neutral grey, a seamless ground swept clean of incident so that nothing competes with the body it holds.
Kristen McMenamy, Palm Beach, 1994.A hand rises to the face, two fingers scissoring a slim cigarette, and the whole photograph arranges itself around that small deliberate act.
Amber Valletta, Ward Pound Ridge, New York, 1995.Where does a bombshell go on her day off?
Amber Valletta, Alder Mansion, Yonkers, New York, 1999.She sits on the floor of a panelled room, leaning back against a low chair as though it were a throne she had decided not to use properly.
Gisele, New York, 2002.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.
Natalia Vodianova, Woolworth Estate, Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, 2002.No photographer has shaped the image of fashion over the past forty years more completely than Steven Meisel.
Daria Werbowy, 2003.Two photographs share this room and only one of them is working.
Liya Kebede, New York, 2003.What Liya Kebede withholds is the face's ordinary work.
A Sexual Revolution, Elise Crombez + Stefan Forrester-Walker, 2004.An empty dock at night, an apron of asphalt ruled by a painted yellow line, and someone has set two black folding chairs down in the middle.
Karen Elson, New York, 2006.Photographers have posed their sitters against mirrors since the medium's first decades — nineteenth-century studios doubled a face to advertise the camera's cleverness, and the Hollywood…
Paris, Je T'Aime, 2007.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…
Karen Elson, New York, 2009.Karen Elson is pulling a long cognac leather glove taut over her fingers, the private ritual of dressing caught at the moment touch becomes performance.
Belle Vere, 2011.Three women at a restaurant table, and on the table — this is the part nobody forgets — plates of pasta.
Raquel Zimmermann, 2011.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.
Carolyn Murphy, Alpine, New Jersey, 2012.Glamour is a form of replication; the fashionable face is already a copy.
Gigi Hadid, 2015.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…