Txema Yeste

A shadow is not a copy but an argument the object cannot control. Yeste stands a dried seed pod on three hair-thin stalks, its dark cupped leaf tilting up like a hat’s brim, and throws its likeness onto the pale wall behind. The cast form refuses to match: where the pod is winged and upright, the shadow slumps into a boat, or a beast with a raised tail, striding on the same impossible legs. Two creatures, one plant, and no telling which is true.

The seduction is obvious and I distrust it a little. Everything here flatters the eye: the elegant splay of the stilt-legs, the way high, even light turns a botanical scrap into a marvel. Photography loves this trick, the promotion of the small and dead into the monumental, and Yeste, a fashion photographer by trade, knows exactly how to perform it. Yet the picture earns its charm, because it also confesses the trick, hanging the false twin of the object right beside it.

The image belongs to Needles, a series in which Yeste turns the studio he built for Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue toward the mute leavings of plants. What survives the transaction is a sense of estrangement: things we would step over become strange fauna, half insect, half dancer. The print is gelatin silver mounted on aluminium Dibond, and the process matters, holding the deep matte black of the pod against a grey so smooth it reads as air. An object and its lie, printed to last.