Steven Meisel American, b. 1954

Wet wood, first of all — the deep lacquered grain of the surface goes slick and reflective where the water has run over it, the figured panel catching the light in long smeared streaks. Everything here is varnish and beading and the high gloss of skin gone the same temperature as the bar top it lies along. Shot from straight above, the picture turns a body into a still life laid out on polished mahogany, water tracking down the boards, a coiled chrome spray hose snaking loose from her hands toward the row of round dials set into the cabinet below.

This is Linda Evangelista in 1990, at the exact moment the supermodel became a kind of weather system, and the photographer who more or less invented that weather has her stretched out, eyes shut, head thrown back, mouth open, soaked. He always understood that glamour is a wet surface — that the charge of an image lives in reflectivity, in the way light skids off a thing rather than sinking in. The dark spheres bracketing the frame, the bank of knobs, the whole speakeasy gleam of it: pure stagecraft, period-perfect, theatrical to the bone. Nothing is incidental.

The overhead vantage is the whole gamble. It flattens the scene into pattern — pale figure on dark grain, the diagonal of one raised knee, the bright bead of water at a heel — and dares you to read pleasure and exposure at once. From his long run of fashion sittings, this is among the franker, stranger pictures, less editorial than fever dream, and the print pulls its blacks down hard so the grain and the gloss do all the talking. The hose lies there, abandoned, still dripping. You can practically hear it.