Steven Meisel American, b. 1954

Naomi Campbell, Coney Island is, before anything else, a photograph of a film being made. A 16mm Bolex is being hand-cranked at her, and the camera that produced this image stands one step further back, watching the watcher. So the picture holds two machines and two kinds of time at once: the moving image still gathering itself frame by frame inside the Bolex, and the single instant that arrests the whole apparatus mid-gesture. We are looking at the production of footage we will never see, fixed as a still we can.

What that doubling makes visible is glamour as labour. On the left, the equipment of fame is being assembled; on the right, Campbell declines to perform for either lens, eyes lowered, mouth soft, one arm crooked above her head where the wind has loosened her hair across her face. The sequined bandeau with its short fringe and the unbuttoned high-waisted trousers are the only things holding tonal weight in a frame burned almost to white, so that sand, sky and sea dissolve into a single bright field and the image nearly relinquishes its own ground.

Made in 1989, as the supermodel hardened into a public idea, it belongs to the Italian Vogue work that made Meisel the defining fashion photographer of his moment — and it is unusually candid about the conditions of that work. He rarely sells; this is an archival pigment print from an edition of seventeen. Few images show the machinery of the image so plainly while keeping their subject so completely beyond it.