Txema Yeste

Follow the one pair of needles that dips down into the dark middle, hanging like a dowser’s rod over nothing. It gives the game away: this silver tangle is not drift but design, hundreds of pine needles teased into a ring the way a session stylist teases hair, strand by strand, until the shape holds. Each needle wears a little dark cap where it once joined the branch, so the whole wreath glitters with tiny punctuation.

Every element of a great beauty picture is here except the beauty. The ring of needles is backlit to a platinum shine, crisp as marcelled hair, and it frames a center of absolute black where the face should be. Call it a cover shoot for a missing star. Or read the shapes: from one angle a nest waiting out the winter, from another a wreath, from another a crown too sharp to wear. The picture flirts with all three and settles on none, which is its kind of wit. The polish stays; the subject has stepped out.

Txema Yeste photographs for Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and Spanish fashion has few images sharper than his; the elemental things, wind, sand, water, fire, keep pushing through the gloss. In the Needles series the elements finally get the whole page to themselves. This print is gelatin silver mounted on aluminium Dibond, and the surface suits them: silver bristling against a black that stays perfectly composed. What holds you is the emptiness, dressed to the nines by everything around it.