has a sense of slightly drifting in space—of not being photographed but painted, and painted by a casual, barely visible presence. But Beaton is there, oh yes.

For all his quiet tread he is one of the most on-the-spot people alive: his visual intelligence is genius—the camera will never be invented that could capture or encompass all that he actually sees. To listen to Beaton describe in strictly visual terms a person or room or landscape is to hear a recitation that can be hilarious or brutal or very beautiful, but will always certainly be brilliant. And that—the remarkable visual intelligence infiltrating his pictures, however diluted—is what makes Beaton’s work unusually separate, the preservative for which our next-century historians will be even more grateful than we are now.

1969

The End