Both arms go up, palms open, as if she were stopping traffic on a road the desert mislaid, or conducting the storm gathering behind her, or signalling in a semaphore that spells nothing but O. It is a gesture of maximum authority performed in maximum undress, and it turns her into a letter of some ceremonial alphabet. From the neck down she is a stack of eyes: a gold disc at the chest, a silver one at the hips, each with its black pupil sliding off-centre, eclipses worn as clothing.
The cartoon eyes hovering at the top right, one wide awake with its comic-strip highlight, one narrowed like a fish, make the joke explicit, and the number 66 floats by her knee like the route number of a highway that never made it across the Atlantic. The title promises lucidity, and the picture keeps the promise perversely: everything in it is an eye except her eyes, which are doing the heavy-lidded, unimpressed work of a professional being looked at. Even the set refuses to lie convincingly, real sand banked against a painted sky, and the pleasure is precisely that of theatre owning up to itself.
Yeste has spent years in the front rank of Spanish fashion photography, for Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and his pictures keep returning to the elements, sand, wind, water, here arranged as knowingly as props in a magician’s cabinet. The archival pigment print holds the greenish storm light and the ochre dune in improbable balance. You could file it under fashion; it would rather be filed under visions.
Both arms go up, palms open, as if she were stopping traffic on a road the desert mislaid, or conducting the storm gathering behind her, or signalling in a semaphore that spells nothing but O. It is a gesture of maximum authority performed in maximum undress, and it turns her into a letter of some ceremonial alphabet. From the neck down she is a stack of eyes: a gold disc at the chest, a silver one at the hips, each with its black pupil sliding off-centre, eclipses worn as clothing.
The cartoon eyes hovering at the top right, one wide awake with its comic-strip highlight, one narrowed like a fish, make the joke explicit, and the number 66 floats by her knee like the route number of a highway that never made it across the Atlantic. The title promises lucidity, and the picture keeps the promise perversely: everything in it is an eye except her eyes, which are doing the heavy-lidded, unimpressed work of a professional being looked at. Even the set refuses to lie convincingly, real sand banked against a painted sky, and the pleasure is precisely that of theatre owning up to itself.
Yeste has spent years in the front rank of Spanish fashion photography, for Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, and his pictures keep returning to the elements, sand, wind, water, here arranged as knowingly as props in a magician’s cabinet. The archival pigment print holds the greenish storm light and the ochre dune in improbable balance. You could file it under fashion; it would rather be filed under visions.