Steven Meisel American, b. 1954

There's a whole genealogy of male poses folded into this 1990 picture, and Steven Meisel knew every one of them. Tony Ward — one of the great beautiful boys of the period, a face Meisel kept coming back to — stands in a New York kitchen in a white ribbed tank and dark jeans, hair combed back wet and gleaming like a forties hood. He's lifted a cigarette, and the exhaled smoke drifts straight up across his own face, dissolving the brow and one eye into haze. It's the oldest trick in the seduction book, and it still works.

What I love is that Meisel shoots it cool, not coy. The undershirt is the brightest thing in the frame, plain cotton catching a flat, frank light that reads the shoulder and the bare arm without prettifying them. Behind him the room goes soft and ordinary — shelving, the dull glint of a pot, the blur of somebody's actual apartment — so the glamour has somewhere real to stand. This is the tough-guy fantasy that ran through the era's image culture, quoted knowingly, half in love with itself, and Meisel lets you see both the pose and the boy inside it.

It's barely fashion at all — closer to a screen-idol portrait, the kind that built a decade's worth of desire on a wet comb and a cigarette. As an archival pigment print in an edition of just seventeen, from a body of work held in major museum collections, it's a clean shot at the period Meisel essentially wrote the grammar for.