The surrealists made the disembodied eye modern art’s most durable charm, clipped to a metronome, sliced on a cinema screen, pinned to a lapel, and this picture knows that lineage cold. Here the eye is set like a jewel in a crumple of gold lamé, gripped underwater by a fist furred with thousands of tiny bubbles, a gold chain hanging from its grasp. What Paris once did with shock, the photograph redoes with luxury: the amulet returns as accessory.
Everything here is directorial, built to happen once in front of a lens. Submersion turns skin to beadwork, every pore holding its silver seed of air; the nails are molten gold talons; the lamé creases like a relic’s wrapping. Beauty photography usually composes a face to receive our look, but this face has been pared down to a single organ and taken in hand. The gaze, for once, is the object: portable, ownable, on a chain. The picture flatters and unsettles in one gesture, which is exactly its contemporary tense.
Yeste is one of the defining figures of Spanish fashion photography, a fixture of Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and water is one of the elements he keeps returning to, along with fire, sand and wind-blown cloth. This frame condenses that elemental appetite into a beauty still of unusual strangeness. The archival pigment print renders what the image depends on, the carbonated fur of bubbles, the wet flare of gold, the small living iris, with jeweler’s clarity, and the pale ground keeps it afloat. An amulet against forgetting, which is one thing photographs are for.
The surrealists made the disembodied eye modern art’s most durable charm, clipped to a metronome, sliced on a cinema screen, pinned to a lapel, and this picture knows that lineage cold. Here the eye is set like a jewel in a crumple of gold lamé, gripped underwater by a fist furred with thousands of tiny bubbles, a gold chain hanging from its grasp. What Paris once did with shock, the photograph redoes with luxury: the amulet returns as accessory.
Everything here is directorial, built to happen once in front of a lens. Submersion turns skin to beadwork, every pore holding its silver seed of air; the nails are molten gold talons; the lamé creases like a relic’s wrapping. Beauty photography usually composes a face to receive our look, but this face has been pared down to a single organ and taken in hand. The gaze, for once, is the object: portable, ownable, on a chain. The picture flatters and unsettles in one gesture, which is exactly its contemporary tense.
Yeste is one of the defining figures of Spanish fashion photography, a fixture of Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and water is one of the elements he keeps returning to, along with fire, sand and wind-blown cloth. This frame condenses that elemental appetite into a beauty still of unusual strangeness. The archival pigment print renders what the image depends on, the carbonated fur of bubbles, the wet flare of gold, the small living iris, with jeweler’s clarity, and the pale ground keeps it afloat. An amulet against forgetting, which is one thing photographs are for.