The Budapest Exception

Redheads occupy a strange position in the cultural imagination—simultaneously fetishized and mocked, rare enough to feel like a discovery and persistent enough in certain latitudes that the novelty should have worn off, but never quite does. The science is genuinely strange: they carry up to thirty thousand fewer hairs than average, their pain receptors behave differently from everyone else’s, they require significantly more anesthesia during surgery. All of this because of pheomelanin, the pigment responsible—which also produces a specific quality of light off the skin that painters and photographers have been chasing since before they had words for what they were chasing.

Anna Lutoskin was born in Budapest in April 1990, and whatever combination of genetics the city assembled seems to have worked out. Her hair sits in the deep strawberry register that reads differently in every quality of light, and her eyes are that particular blue-green that doesn’t commit to either color—the kind that photographs unpredictably and looks unreliable in person in the best possible way. By nineteen she’d appeared in Glamour and a handful of other European publications and shot campaigns for Pull & Bear and Rosa Clara, among others.

There’s a quality that certain Eastern European models have that Western fashion shoots consistently misread—an austerity of expression that photographs as cold in mediocre work and devastating in good work. Lutoskin has it. Put her in front of someone who knows what they’re doing and the result is the kind of image that stays past its context. Put her in front of someone who doesn’t and you still get a pretty girl looking vaguely elsewhere, which is a reasonably good outcome, but not the point.

The gap between recognizable and genuinely remarkable is thinner than it looks from the outside and harder to cross than most people expect. It doesn’t always come down to talent—often it doesn’t come down to talent at all. She had the face for it. I hope the rest fell into place.