To be shown in profile is to be compared to a coin, to everyone who has ever been carved into stone. The picture accepts the dare. A young woman’s face turns to the right in clean profile, her dark hair drawn back wet and flat, and just behind her a marble head turns the same way, its blind carved eye and calm mouth set at her exact angle. Between them a pale ruffle of cloth hangs soft against so much stillness.
Everything here is the colour of chalk and cream, so the one warm event is her skin, and the one bright event is the sliver of green in her open eye. Yeste holds the two heads, one breathing, one antique, close enough to rhyme but never to merge. The comparison is generous rather than cruel. She is not asked to become the statue; the statue is asked to admit that it was once a face, that marble began as someone looked at, someone loved.
The sitter is Bella Hadid, and the maker is Txema Yeste, among the leading fashion photographers of Spain, whose pictures for Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue keep faith with an older art of the profile. Printed as an archival pigment print, its greys and creams stay continuous and matte, the way marble is matte, so that skin and stone share one uninterrupted light. What the image asserts, finally, is that beauty is a form of memory: we recognise a face because we have seen it before, in a museum, on a coin, in a dream.
To be shown in profile is to be compared to a coin, to everyone who has ever been carved into stone. The picture accepts the dare. A young woman’s face turns to the right in clean profile, her dark hair drawn back wet and flat, and just behind her a marble head turns the same way, its blind carved eye and calm mouth set at her exact angle. Between them a pale ruffle of cloth hangs soft against so much stillness.
Everything here is the colour of chalk and cream, so the one warm event is her skin, and the one bright event is the sliver of green in her open eye. Yeste holds the two heads, one breathing, one antique, close enough to rhyme but never to merge. The comparison is generous rather than cruel. She is not asked to become the statue; the statue is asked to admit that it was once a face, that marble began as someone looked at, someone loved.
The sitter is Bella Hadid, and the maker is Txema Yeste, among the leading fashion photographers of Spain, whose pictures for Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue keep faith with an older art of the profile. Printed as an archival pigment print, its greys and creams stay continuous and matte, the way marble is matte, so that skin and stone share one uninterrupted light. What the image asserts, finally, is that beauty is a form of memory: we recognise a face because we have seen it before, in a museum, on a coin, in a dream.