A closed eye is the most glamorous accessory a face can wear. This picture doubles the bet: two faces, both upside down, both sealed shut, drift at the bottom of the frame like swimmers on their backs, while behind them a green marsh and a lazy silver river pretend to be the world. One face arrives in the flesh, soft-focus, lips parted just so; the other floats inside a tinted disc, reflection or companion, the picture won’t say.
Beauty pages usually sell wakefulness, the lit-up eye, the ready mouth; this one sells the opposite and makes it luxurious. The real landscape is skin, photographed close enough that a cheekbone becomes a hillside, while the actual scenery, all that green, goes conveniently out of focus. The disc reads as a compact mirror scaled up to widescreen, a whisper of reversed lettering along its rim like glamour’s fine print. And the color story is flawless: rose lips, bronze lids, a river of pale blue slipping between banks so green they hum. It is a swoon, art-directed, and it knows exactly how long to hold it.
He came up through Barcelona to the top tier of Spanish fashion photography, and his beauty work for titles from Numéro to Vogue keeps a landscape painter’s patience inside the glossiest of formats; water winds through his pictures the way it winds through this backdrop. As an archival pigment print, the image preserves its velvet range, deep greens, warm skin, that sliver of river light, a page torn from the newsstand and promoted, at last, to the wall.
A closed eye is the most glamorous accessory a face can wear. This picture doubles the bet: two faces, both upside down, both sealed shut, drift at the bottom of the frame like swimmers on their backs, while behind them a green marsh and a lazy silver river pretend to be the world. One face arrives in the flesh, soft-focus, lips parted just so; the other floats inside a tinted disc, reflection or companion, the picture won’t say.
Beauty pages usually sell wakefulness, the lit-up eye, the ready mouth; this one sells the opposite and makes it luxurious. The real landscape is skin, photographed close enough that a cheekbone becomes a hillside, while the actual scenery, all that green, goes conveniently out of focus. The disc reads as a compact mirror scaled up to widescreen, a whisper of reversed lettering along its rim like glamour’s fine print. And the color story is flawless: rose lips, bronze lids, a river of pale blue slipping between banks so green they hum. It is a swoon, art-directed, and it knows exactly how long to hold it.
He came up through Barcelona to the top tier of Spanish fashion photography, and his beauty work for titles from Numéro to Vogue keeps a landscape painter’s patience inside the glossiest of formats; water winds through his pictures the way it winds through this backdrop. As an archival pigment print, the image preserves its velvet range, deep greens, warm skin, that sliver of river light, a page torn from the newsstand and promoted, at last, to the wall.