The weather in this photograph is strictly local: a downpour maybe two feet wide, raging precisely where a face happens to be. Elsewhere, you have to assume, the day was perfectly fine. The light, meanwhile, behaves like dye rather than illumination: it enters the scene colorless and comes out red, every droplet near her mouth and slicked-back hair picking up a flush of lipstick and carrying it off, as if the water were stealing her makeup one bead at a time.
Breathless is a title with previous owners, Godard among them, but the breathlessness here is not an attitude; it is respiratory. Her lips are pressed into a red seal, eyes shut against the onslaught, chin tucked like a swimmer who has badly misjudged a wave. A beauty photograph is supposed to promise serenity; this one promises endurance, and somewhere inside the chaos a claim is being made about lipstick. The droplets hang in absurd sharpness, a chandelier dismantled in mid-air, and through them her composure reads as either discipline or bliss; the picture, to its credit, declines to say which.
Water is one of Yeste’s recurring elements: fire, sand and wind-blown cloth run through his editorial work for Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and water is the one he trusts with faces. Here it is compressed to the scale of a portrait, and the archival pigment print keeps every bead intact, storm-grey at the bottom of the frame, blushing pink at the top. It belongs somewhere dry. The mismatch is the pleasure.
The weather in this photograph is strictly local: a downpour maybe two feet wide, raging precisely where a face happens to be. Elsewhere, you have to assume, the day was perfectly fine. The light, meanwhile, behaves like dye rather than illumination: it enters the scene colorless and comes out red, every droplet near her mouth and slicked-back hair picking up a flush of lipstick and carrying it off, as if the water were stealing her makeup one bead at a time.
Breathless is a title with previous owners, Godard among them, but the breathlessness here is not an attitude; it is respiratory. Her lips are pressed into a red seal, eyes shut against the onslaught, chin tucked like a swimmer who has badly misjudged a wave. A beauty photograph is supposed to promise serenity; this one promises endurance, and somewhere inside the chaos a claim is being made about lipstick. The droplets hang in absurd sharpness, a chandelier dismantled in mid-air, and through them her composure reads as either discipline or bliss; the picture, to its credit, declines to say which.
Water is one of Yeste’s recurring elements: fire, sand and wind-blown cloth run through his editorial work for Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and water is the one he trusts with faces. Here it is compressed to the scale of a portrait, and the archival pigment print keeps every bead intact, storm-grey at the bottom of the frame, blushing pink at the top. It belongs somewhere dry. The mismatch is the pleasure.