All the light in this picture has gathered into a single sphere, a pearl the size of the whole mouth, glowing as if it held a small overcast sky inside it. Everything else is dark and wet: lips lacquered a dripping black, streaked with reflected white, the tongue a band of pink beneath. The pearl is the sun of the image and its weather too, a soft luminous grey clouding at the edges, the one calm thing in a frame otherwise given to gloss and shadow.
The title carries us to Cadaqués, that white Catalan town on the Costa Brava where the Mediterranean light has undone more than one painter, and it is tempting to read this pearl as a piece of that coast, an oyster’s secret brought ashore. Her name, Valentina, is set beside the place, and the two together turn a beauty study into something like a small myth. To look is to be asked whether the pearl is offered or withheld, swallowed or about to be spoken. The mouth keeps its counsel.
Yeste is a leading figure of Spanish fashion photography, his work seen in Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and his instinct for the elemental, sea and stone and light, presses even into a close-up this intimate. The archival pigment print is what lets the pearl breathe, holding its pale grey against the deep black lacquer without either bleeding into the other, each drip and highlight preserved. It is a print that seems to glow from within, the way a pearl does, keeping its light long after the mouth has closed.
All the light in this picture has gathered into a single sphere, a pearl the size of the whole mouth, glowing as if it held a small overcast sky inside it. Everything else is dark and wet: lips lacquered a dripping black, streaked with reflected white, the tongue a band of pink beneath. The pearl is the sun of the image and its weather too, a soft luminous grey clouding at the edges, the one calm thing in a frame otherwise given to gloss and shadow.
The title carries us to Cadaqués, that white Catalan town on the Costa Brava where the Mediterranean light has undone more than one painter, and it is tempting to read this pearl as a piece of that coast, an oyster’s secret brought ashore. Her name, Valentina, is set beside the place, and the two together turn a beauty study into something like a small myth. To look is to be asked whether the pearl is offered or withheld, swallowed or about to be spoken. The mouth keeps its counsel.
Yeste is a leading figure of Spanish fashion photography, his work seen in Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and his instinct for the elemental, sea and stone and light, presses even into a close-up this intimate. The archival pigment print is what lets the pearl breathe, holding its pale grey against the deep black lacquer without either bleeding into the other, each drip and highlight preserved. It is a print that seems to glow from within, the way a pearl does, keeping its light long after the mouth has closed.