We are underground, standing in the dark of a cave whose walls run acid green and electric blue wherever the light touches them. At the left, perfectly still, a figure in a floor-length robe with a sheen of heated copper; her long russet hair merges with the collar; her gaze finds us anyway. Plato set the first image-theater in a cave. Fashion, never slow to claim a good address, has moved in.
Nothing here pretends to be natural. The green is the green of projection, the blue is chemical, and one ember of orange glows at the right like a door left open in a furnace. The robe rises to a high collar and falls without interruption to the floor, less a garment than a column; the woman wearing it has the stillness of an idol that expects offerings. This is the seduction the photograph practices, and it is honest about practicing it. An image that confesses its artifice does not thereby become innocent; it becomes confident, which is more dangerous and more beautiful.
Yeste photographed this in Ibiza, an island whose caves predate its discotheques, and the picture knowingly runs the two together: geology as nightclub, grotto as stage. He belongs to the front rank of Spanish fashion photography, a fixture of Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and his recurring subjects are elemental, rock, water, fire, cloth. The archival pigment print sustains these saturated darks without letting them clot. One looks, disapproves of one’s own credulity, and goes on looking.
We are underground, standing in the dark of a cave whose walls run acid green and electric blue wherever the light touches them. At the left, perfectly still, a figure in a floor-length robe with a sheen of heated copper; her long russet hair merges with the collar; her gaze finds us anyway. Plato set the first image-theater in a cave. Fashion, never slow to claim a good address, has moved in.
Nothing here pretends to be natural. The green is the green of projection, the blue is chemical, and one ember of orange glows at the right like a door left open in a furnace. The robe rises to a high collar and falls without interruption to the floor, less a garment than a column; the woman wearing it has the stillness of an idol that expects offerings. This is the seduction the photograph practices, and it is honest about practicing it. An image that confesses its artifice does not thereby become innocent; it becomes confident, which is more dangerous and more beautiful.
Yeste photographed this in Ibiza, an island whose caves predate its discotheques, and the picture knowingly runs the two together: geology as nightclub, grotto as stage. He belongs to the front rank of Spanish fashion photography, a fixture of Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and his recurring subjects are elemental, rock, water, fire, cloth. The archival pigment print sustains these saturated darks without letting them clot. One looks, disapproves of one’s own credulity, and goes on looking.