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Txema Yeste

Spanish, b. 1972
Borderlines, Michelle Laff, 2023
Archival Pigment Print.
20 x 24 in / 50 × 60 cm
30 x 40 in / 76 × 101 cm
40 x 60 in / 101 x 152 cm
59 x 76 3/4 in / 150 x 195 cm
Hand-signed by artist, mounted, titled, editioned and print date in ink label affixed to mount verso
Edition of 5 — 20 x 24 in / 50 × 60 cm
Edition of 5 — 30 x 40 in / 76 × 101 cm
Edition of 3 — 40 x 60 in / 101 x 152 cm
Edition of 1 — 59 x 76 3/4 in / 150 x 195 cm
© The Artist

Fog is the real art director here. It has primed the sky to a blank white, half-dissolved a derelict shingled house, its twin gables sagging toward each other like the ruin of a fairy tale, and left the foreground grasses as dark calligraphy at the edges. Into that soft, directionless light the photographer inserts a figure of absolute black: a woman mid-stride in a vast high-collared cape, her profile just clearing the collar, so crisply silhouetted she reads as a paper cut-out laid over the scene.

This is fashion image-making that borrows the grammar of cinema: the abandoned location, the caped protagonist, a narrative implied and withheld. Only the shoes give the production away: their transparent heels catch the one glint of light in all that black, a wink of contemporary product inside a gothic tableau. The title, Borderlines, feels exact: between editorial and film still, between couture and costume, between the house’s past and the figure’s forward motion.

Txema Yeste, born in Barcelona, stands in the front rank of Spanish fashion photography, with pages in Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and an elemental undertow runs through his editorial work: wind, water, weather, cloth in motion. Here the element is fog, and the cape answers it in unbroken black. Printed as an archival pigment print, the image runs a complete monochrome scale, paper white through veiled greys to that saturated silhouette, and keeps both registers alive: a couture image with the nerve of a ghost story, and the discipline to let neither win.

Borderlines, Michelle Laff