What we are not permitted to see is her face, and the refusal is the picture’s first act of tact. A screen of red stalks, dried and curling at their tips, rises across her like a veil that grew rather than was hung. Behind it one eye holds steady, the rest given over to shadow and thorn. She sits high against a cloudless blue, wrapped in a black garment so inflated it reads as architecture, its padded arms lifted and bent to frame the head it half conceals.
To look is to be kept at a courteous distance. The red branches, some botanist’s discard bleached and dyed to the color of dried blood, insist that we earn the sight of her by looking through them, and the looking becomes patient, almost devotional. There is a desert somewhere at the edges, pale scrub at the bottom of the frame, though the sky claims most of the air. Tanya, the title tells us, and the name steadies the encounter, returning a person to what could have been mere spectacle.
Yeste came up through the front rank of Spanish fashion photography, working for Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and his lasting subject has been the elemental pressed against the human, wind and fire and now these funerary reeds. The archival pigment print carries the strange chord of the image, the wet black of the coat, the rust and scarlet of the stalks, the untroubled blue behind, each held at its own pitch. What it withholds it also protects. She remains composed, guarded, unread.
What we are not permitted to see is her face, and the refusal is the picture’s first act of tact. A screen of red stalks, dried and curling at their tips, rises across her like a veil that grew rather than was hung. Behind it one eye holds steady, the rest given over to shadow and thorn. She sits high against a cloudless blue, wrapped in a black garment so inflated it reads as architecture, its padded arms lifted and bent to frame the head it half conceals.
To look is to be kept at a courteous distance. The red branches, some botanist’s discard bleached and dyed to the color of dried blood, insist that we earn the sight of her by looking through them, and the looking becomes patient, almost devotional. There is a desert somewhere at the edges, pale scrub at the bottom of the frame, though the sky claims most of the air. Tanya, the title tells us, and the name steadies the encounter, returning a person to what could have been mere spectacle.
Yeste came up through the front rank of Spanish fashion photography, working for Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and his lasting subject has been the elemental pressed against the human, wind and fire and now these funerary reeds. The archival pigment print carries the strange chord of the image, the wet black of the coat, the rust and scarlet of the stalks, the untroubled blue behind, each held at its own pitch. What it withholds it also protects. She remains composed, guarded, unread.