She hangs, or rather she has just stopped rising: feet pressed together and pointed like a dancer’s, sleeves of rust-red cloth still swelling with the motion, orange hair flung upward into a burning corona that has not yet settled. The architecture around her, all sand-coloured plaster cut into triangles, cannot decide whether I am lying beneath her or standing above a well. I accept the confusion; levitation is precisely the refusal of prepositions.
The picture is full of grand machinery, twin planes of ochre tile spreading beneath her like the wings of some enormous resting moth, a wedge of white daylight cut into the ceiling to frame her exactly, a far opening where trees blur. Yet what unsettles my composure is minute: her gaze. She looks directly down at me, unastonished, faintly grave, as though gravity were my superstition and not her problem. Suspended between sky and pit, she performs the oldest dream of the body, weightlessness, while her expression declines to celebrate it. That refusal, calm as marble, is where the photograph lodges itself in me.
Yeste, Barcelona-born and long established at the front of Spanish fashion photography, keeps returning his magazine work, for Numéro, for Harper’s Bazaar, for Vogue, to the elements; usually fire, water, sand or wind-worried cloth, here simply air. The archival pigment print gives the terracotta its heat and the plaster its cool, and holds Assa Baradji there, mid-flight, forever, which is to say: it does what photography has always promised us and so rarely, so literally, performs.
She hangs, or rather she has just stopped rising: feet pressed together and pointed like a dancer’s, sleeves of rust-red cloth still swelling with the motion, orange hair flung upward into a burning corona that has not yet settled. The architecture around her, all sand-coloured plaster cut into triangles, cannot decide whether I am lying beneath her or standing above a well. I accept the confusion; levitation is precisely the refusal of prepositions.
The picture is full of grand machinery, twin planes of ochre tile spreading beneath her like the wings of some enormous resting moth, a wedge of white daylight cut into the ceiling to frame her exactly, a far opening where trees blur. Yet what unsettles my composure is minute: her gaze. She looks directly down at me, unastonished, faintly grave, as though gravity were my superstition and not her problem. Suspended between sky and pit, she performs the oldest dream of the body, weightlessness, while her expression declines to celebrate it. That refusal, calm as marble, is where the photograph lodges itself in me.
Yeste, Barcelona-born and long established at the front of Spanish fashion photography, keeps returning his magazine work, for Numéro, for Harper’s Bazaar, for Vogue, to the elements; usually fire, water, sand or wind-worried cloth, here simply air. The archival pigment print gives the terracotta its heat and the plaster its cool, and holds Assa Baradji there, mid-flight, forever, which is to say: it does what photography has always promised us and so rarely, so literally, performs.