A particular blue belongs to no hour of the day: the blue of a television playing in a dark room. Here it has swallowed an entire beach. Sand, sea and sky are steeped in it, graded from pale, chalky foreground to an ink-dark horizon, and the one object that could plausibly have produced it, an old cathode-ray set parked on the sand, glows at the picture’s right edge like the scene’s secret sun.
The model takes a sprinter’s crouch, hands braced on the cabinet as if on starting blocks, her long diagonal of a body pointing out of the frame. On the screen beneath her palms, a face: lips, lowered lids, a close-up in the same violet-blue register. So the photograph holds two kinds of image at once, the live body and the broadcast face, and quietly asks which one we trust. Television, that old rival of photography, is here reduced to a plinth; the body uses the image-machine as furniture, and prepares to run.
The title gives a name and an island, Naomi and Barbuda; the maker is Txema Yeste, Barcelona-born, of the front rank of Spanish fashion photography, his pages running through Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. An elemental strain, water, sand, wind, moves through his work, and here it meets its opposite: an obsolete appliance at the tide line. The archival pigment print sustains these deep blues without losing the screen’s glow to the sky’s. It is beauty photography that thinks like an essay, which is rarer than it should be.
A particular blue belongs to no hour of the day: the blue of a television playing in a dark room. Here it has swallowed an entire beach. Sand, sea and sky are steeped in it, graded from pale, chalky foreground to an ink-dark horizon, and the one object that could plausibly have produced it, an old cathode-ray set parked on the sand, glows at the picture’s right edge like the scene’s secret sun.
The model takes a sprinter’s crouch, hands braced on the cabinet as if on starting blocks, her long diagonal of a body pointing out of the frame. On the screen beneath her palms, a face: lips, lowered lids, a close-up in the same violet-blue register. So the photograph holds two kinds of image at once, the live body and the broadcast face, and quietly asks which one we trust. Television, that old rival of photography, is here reduced to a plinth; the body uses the image-machine as furniture, and prepares to run.
The title gives a name and an island, Naomi and Barbuda; the maker is Txema Yeste, Barcelona-born, of the front rank of Spanish fashion photography, his pages running through Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. An elemental strain, water, sand, wind, moves through his work, and here it meets its opposite: an obsolete appliance at the tide line. The archival pigment print sustains these deep blues without losing the screen’s glow to the sky’s. It is beauty photography that thinks like an essay, which is rarer than it should be.