Both of them are airborne, and neither will quite catch the other. That is the whole charge of the picture: Ric, naked, folds forward at the top of his bounce, one hand flat against his own chest as if to steady a heartbeat, while Rowdy rockets up off the black trampoline mat with his jaws open and his coat smeared into pure motion. The dog is the only blur in an otherwise crisp frame, and Weber lets that streak of fur do the work a slower shutter never could — it tells you exactly how fast joy is moving.
Weber built a whole sensibility on the male body as something to be adored without apology, and here he stages it on a backyard trampoline with a golden retriever as accomplice. The palm fronds fan out behind the leap like a stage flat; below the horizon, a thin grey line of Atlantic keeps the thing honest. It is glamour, but it is also slapstick, and Weber knew the two were never far apart. The buttock and the shoulder are sculpted by Florida light, yes, and they are also just a man jumping for the sheer animal fun of it, caught at the apex where gravity hasn't yet remembered him.
This is the Weber of the long Florida idylls — the sun, the dogs, the unembarrassed flesh that filled the Abercrombie campaigns and the pages of his own books. What keeps the frame from preening is the dog: Rowdy doesn't pose, can't, and his upward lunge pulls Ric's beauty back down to earth, makes it warm-blooded and a little ridiculous and all the more wanted for it. A vintage gelatin silver print from one of the most collected names in American photography, and a rare one — most of Weber's idols stand still. This one leaps.
Both of them are airborne, and neither will quite catch the other. That is the whole charge of the picture: Ric, naked, folds forward at the top of his bounce, one hand flat against his own chest as if to steady a heartbeat, while Rowdy rockets up off the black trampoline mat with his jaws open and his coat smeared into pure motion. The dog is the only blur in an otherwise crisp frame, and Weber lets that streak of fur do the work a slower shutter never could — it tells you exactly how fast joy is moving.
Weber built a whole sensibility on the male body as something to be adored without apology, and here he stages it on a backyard trampoline with a golden retriever as accomplice. The palm fronds fan out behind the leap like a stage flat; below the horizon, a thin grey line of Atlantic keeps the thing honest. It is glamour, but it is also slapstick, and Weber knew the two were never far apart. The buttock and the shoulder are sculpted by Florida light, yes, and they are also just a man jumping for the sheer animal fun of it, caught at the apex where gravity hasn't yet remembered him.
This is the Weber of the long Florida idylls — the sun, the dogs, the unembarrassed flesh that filled the Abercrombie campaigns and the pages of his own books. What keeps the frame from preening is the dog: Rowdy doesn't pose, can't, and his upward lunge pulls Ric's beauty back down to earth, makes it warm-blooded and a little ridiculous and all the more wanted for it. A vintage gelatin silver print from one of the most collected names in American photography, and a rare one — most of Weber's idols stand still. This one leaps.