Txema Yeste

She withholds nearly everything a portrait is expected to deliver. The eyes are shadowed and aimed elsewhere; the body turns away into profile; even the pomegranate in her hand stops short of her mouth, offered and not yet accepted. The picture is built on that refusal, and is the more generous for it.

Yeste's problem was an old one — how to describe a dark form against bright water without flattering either — and his solution is severe. He exposes for the sun's few concessions: the wet crown of the head, a rim of light along the nose, beads of seawater standing on the shoulder, and above all the split fruit, whose red seeds are the single loud word in an otherwise whispered sentence. The sea behind her goes to a pale, unincriminating wash; the snakeskin pattern of the swimsuit surfaces only where the light permits. The frame is close, vertical, decisive, cropping at ear and arm, so that the face reads less as likeness than as coastline.

Photographs describe; they decline to explain. What the fruit means to her — appetite, ceremony, or the plain pleasure of something cool and red on bright water — remains her property. The camera is granted the quarter inch between lips and pomegranate, and it is in that small unclosed interval that the picture does its living.