There is so much light in this photograph that it behaves less like illumination than like weather, a soft white fog rolling through a black-and-white portrait, dissolving a woman’s blonde hair into vapour and softening her face until it is barely there. Everything is out of focus and slightly overexposed, as if the picture had been taken through breath on cold glass. And then, hung at her collarbone, one thing refuses the mist: a diamond necklace, its flower-shaped pendant glittering with an almost rude precision.
It is a strange arrangement of priorities. The face, which fashion usually insists we memorise, is allowed to melt; the jewel, which is only ever borrowed, is the one thing held sharp. You could read this as a sly joke about what a luxury image actually values, or simply enjoy the atmosphere, which is that of a half-remembered afternoon, someone glimpsed across a bright room before your eyes adjusted. The blur is not failure but mood, the whole picture set to the temperature of reverie.
The woman is Amber Valletta, and the maker, Txema Yeste, belongs to the front rank of Spanish fashion photographers, at home in Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue and unusually willing to let an image go soft in pursuit of feeling. Printed as a black-and-white archival pigment print, the surface keeps that haze continuous and grainless, so the diamonds glint out of a field of pearl-grey light. It is a photograph about the pleasure of not quite seeing, and about the one hard, faceted thing we are permitted to see clearly.
There is so much light in this photograph that it behaves less like illumination than like weather, a soft white fog rolling through a black-and-white portrait, dissolving a woman’s blonde hair into vapour and softening her face until it is barely there. Everything is out of focus and slightly overexposed, as if the picture had been taken through breath on cold glass. And then, hung at her collarbone, one thing refuses the mist: a diamond necklace, its flower-shaped pendant glittering with an almost rude precision.
It is a strange arrangement of priorities. The face, which fashion usually insists we memorise, is allowed to melt; the jewel, which is only ever borrowed, is the one thing held sharp. You could read this as a sly joke about what a luxury image actually values, or simply enjoy the atmosphere, which is that of a half-remembered afternoon, someone glimpsed across a bright room before your eyes adjusted. The blur is not failure but mood, the whole picture set to the temperature of reverie.
The woman is Amber Valletta, and the maker, Txema Yeste, belongs to the front rank of Spanish fashion photographers, at home in Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue and unusually willing to let an image go soft in pursuit of feeling. Printed as a black-and-white archival pigment print, the surface keeps that haze continuous and grainless, so the diamonds glint out of a field of pearl-grey light. It is a photograph about the pleasure of not quite seeing, and about the one hard, faceted thing we are permitted to see clearly.