Txema Yeste

One breath of air from now, both pine-needle figures will be flat on the white floor. For the moment they hold: the taller one leans into the wall with arms flung wide and legs arched like a dancer resting between takes, needles crossed at a dark knot; its small companion tilts at the lower right, a whole drama of scale and kinship built from almost nothing. The photograph exists because the collapse had not happened yet.

This is a directed picture, and it wears its direction lightly. Nothing here was found; needles do not stand up, cross their limbs, or pair off by themselves. Someone propped, adjusted, stepped back, the same sequence that governs a fashion set, minus the model, the clothes and the retinue. What remains is pure casting: a lead and a supporting role, blocked against a seamless white like figures on a stage flat. The staging is so spare that the relationship becomes the subject. Parent and child, choreographer and pupil, star and understudy: the picture lets every reading stand, and confirms none.

Txema Yeste made his career directing images for Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, at the front rank of Spanish fashion photography. In the Needles series he keeps the director’s instincts and abandons the apparatus, working with nothing more than what a pine tree discards. The print is gelatin silver mounted on aluminium Dibond, a cool, flat, resolutely contemporary object whose whites hold the wall’s faint texture. Gravity resumed its duties the moment after. Here, the two of them are still upright, still together.