Steven Meisel American, b. 1954

She gives the camera everything and nothing. The face fills the frame, frontal, undefended, close enough to count the freckles scattered across the bridge of the nose, and yet the one thing a portrait is supposed to surrender — what she is thinking — is exactly what stays out of reach. The lips are parted, mid-breath, on the edge of a word that does not come. The eyes are open very wide, pale and level, but they decline to perform. This is a face that has agreed to be looked at while withholding the reason.

It helps to remember what kind of picture this is. Made in 1992, at Ward Pound Ridge in New York, it belongs to a body of fashion portraiture that the photographer normally bends toward spectacle and persona. Here the apparatus is reversed. The blurred summer landscape behind her — a low band of trees, a smear of light at the right — dissolves into nothing, refusing to anchor her in any narrative. No styling carries the image. A man's striped shirt hangs open at the collar, a single mother-of-pearl button doing the only fastening, and a thin silver hoop sits at the nostril like a small, deliberate fact. These are the props of plainness, and plainness, photographed this closely, becomes its own kind of mask.

What the still image does, that film never could, is hold this suspended look indefinitely without resolving it. We keep waiting for the expression to declare itself and it never will; the photograph has fixed her precisely at the threshold before meaning. That refusal is the picture's intelligence. It hands us proximity in place of access, and trusts that we will feel the difference.