What is he laughing at, this boy stretched out on a strip of carpet in a Twentynine Palms parking lot? Not us, not quite. His head is tipped back, mouth open, eyes nearly shut against the desert glare, and the joke seems to be the whole arrangement: shirtless on the ground beside a dusty sedan, an Igloo cooler doubling as a side table, a white plastic bucket parked at his shoulder like a prop nobody bothered to dress. He is sweating, sunlit, completely at ease, and the picture lets you in on the ease without ever quite letting you in on the punchline.
That cooler is the giveaway. This is glamour with the air-conditioning off — beefcake relocated from the studio to the gas-station edge of the Mojave, where the palms are scrubby and the parked car has whitewall tires and a sun-bleached hood. The man's torso has the easy, unposed muscularity this photographer made into a house style through the eighties, but here it's grounded in heat and dust and the cheap reflective gleam of a beverage cooler. The eroticism is real and it is also affectionately ridiculous, which is the harder thing to pull off.
It belongs to the same long American reverie — boys, bodies, road trips, the sun-struck male nude let loose in the landscape — that built this photographer's reputation across the magazines and the great campaign books. Dave is no model's name; he's a found beauty, the kind this artist liked to discover at the side of the road and treat like a star. The print, gelatin silver and offered in the intimate 11 x 14 and the wall-commanding 20 x 24, keeps every grain of that bright, laughing afternoon. You still don't know the joke. You just want to stay for it.
What is he laughing at, this boy stretched out on a strip of carpet in a Twentynine Palms parking lot? Not us, not quite. His head is tipped back, mouth open, eyes nearly shut against the desert glare, and the joke seems to be the whole arrangement: shirtless on the ground beside a dusty sedan, an Igloo cooler doubling as a side table, a white plastic bucket parked at his shoulder like a prop nobody bothered to dress. He is sweating, sunlit, completely at ease, and the picture lets you in on the ease without ever quite letting you in on the punchline.
That cooler is the giveaway. This is glamour with the air-conditioning off — beefcake relocated from the studio to the gas-station edge of the Mojave, where the palms are scrubby and the parked car has whitewall tires and a sun-bleached hood. The man's torso has the easy, unposed muscularity this photographer made into a house style through the eighties, but here it's grounded in heat and dust and the cheap reflective gleam of a beverage cooler. The eroticism is real and it is also affectionately ridiculous, which is the harder thing to pull off.
It belongs to the same long American reverie — boys, bodies, road trips, the sun-struck male nude let loose in the landscape — that built this photographer's reputation across the magazines and the great campaign books. Dave is no model's name; he's a found beauty, the kind this artist liked to discover at the side of the road and treat like a star. The print, gelatin silver and offered in the intimate 11 x 14 and the wall-commanding 20 x 24, keeps every grain of that bright, laughing afternoon. You still don't know the joke. You just want to stay for it.