That Pink, That Tongue, That Flash

Terry Richardson photographs Charlotte Free, and what you get is a very specific kind of image: harsh on-camera flash, clean white background, a woman who knows precisely what she’s doing with her face. Free, whose pink hair had become a genuine personal signature before it became a Halloween wig, had a particular charge in front of Richardson’s lens—tongue out, eyes somewhere between boredom and provocation, the practiced insolence of someone who’d already decided that the most interesting thing to do in front of a camera is make the person behind it slightly uncertain. Richardson’s work carries its own shadow now, a weight that makes it hard to look at without the cloud trailing behind. But the photographs themselves have an unpolished directness that most fashion work is too careful to allow itself. Charlotte Free in that context looked less like she was being photographed and more like she was letting it happen, on terms that suited her.