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Txema Yeste

Spanish, b. 1972
In the Afternoon, New York, 2017
Archival Pigment Print.
20 x 24 in / 50 × 60 cm
30 x 40 in / 76 × 101 cm
40 x 60 in / 101 x 152 cm
59 x 76 3/4 in / 150 x 195 cm
Hand-signed by artist, mounted, titled, editioned and print date in ink label affixed to mount verso
Edition of 5 — 20 x 24 in / 50 × 60 cm
Edition of 5 — 30 x 40 in / 76 × 101 cm
Edition of 3 — 40 x 60 in / 101 x 152 cm
Edition of 1 — 59 x 76 3/4 in / 150 x 195 cm
© The Artist

We are not shown the face. The head hangs back over a white rail, reddish hair streaming sideways in the afternoon wind, and where a gaze might have met ours there is instead a throat, a jaw, a moving curtain of hair. A second body enters from the left, cropped to its legs and beaded skirt, its owner withheld above the frame. The photograph keeps its people from us even as it hands over everything they are wearing.

Even the words are partial. A painted board reads RK BETWEEN POSTS, the start of some prohibition cropped or worn away, so that a plain rule about parking becomes a fragment of private language. Behind the figures a row of pale, two-story houses stands in low gold light, a white picket fence and an empty road between them and us. The suburb is specific and anonymous at once, a backdrop that keeps its distance from the story. Its title names New York, though the warm light and low houses suggest somewhere gentler and less fixed.

The image belongs to a fashion practice fond of catching its subjects off the vertical, mid-fall, as though poise were something the body kept losing and finding again. Among the leading figures of Spanish fashion photography, published across the magazines that set its terms, he lets the late sun do the couture’s work, gilding sheer beaded cloth until it burns against the blue sky. Printed as an archival pigment print, that warmth is held exactly, down to the last thread of light in the hair.

In the Afternoon, New York