The studium is easy to name: a woman, a green dress sliding from the shoulder, the deliberate pictorialist haze, fashion remembering that it was once painting. I recognize all this the way knowledge interests me, coolly. The Maison Européenne de la Photographie holds such images; the Centre Pompidou too. I could speak of lineage, of the hand-coloured plate, of reverie made to order for a newspaper. None of it catches on me.
What catches is the mouth. Everything in this picture dissolves — the contour of the arm thins into the ground, the folds blur, the whole surface seems breathed-on, recovered from some plate left too long in water. And then, against all that softness, the lips: a deep rose, almost the single act of will in the frame, the one place the photograph refuses to forget itself. The face is turned away, lowered, half-given; the eyes are nearly closed. But that rose insists. It is the punctum — not the elegance, not the green, but this small stubborn warmth that survives the drowning, the hook on which my looking snags and will not come free.
I keep returning to it. The dress falls, the shoulder bares itself, and I think: she is not posing, she is disappearing, and the lipstick is what stays behind. Sasha pour New York Times, made in 1994 and issued in fifteen prints only, an archival pigment — but the number is studium. The mouth is mine.
The studium is easy to name: a woman, a green dress sliding from the shoulder, the deliberate pictorialist haze, fashion remembering that it was once painting. I recognize all this the way knowledge interests me, coolly. The Maison Européenne de la Photographie holds such images; the Centre Pompidou too. I could speak of lineage, of the hand-coloured plate, of reverie made to order for a newspaper. None of it catches on me.
What catches is the mouth. Everything in this picture dissolves — the contour of the arm thins into the ground, the folds blur, the whole surface seems breathed-on, recovered from some plate left too long in water. And then, against all that softness, the lips: a deep rose, almost the single act of will in the frame, the one place the photograph refuses to forget itself. The face is turned away, lowered, half-given; the eyes are nearly closed. But that rose insists. It is the punctum — not the elegance, not the green, but this small stubborn warmth that survives the drowning, the hook on which my looking snags and will not come free.
I keep returning to it. The dress falls, the shoulder bares itself, and I think: she is not posing, she is disappearing, and the lipstick is what stays behind. Sasha pour New York Times, made in 1994 and issued in fifteen prints only, an archival pigment — but the number is studium. The mouth is mine.