Colour comes before the face does: a fringe of frayed straw hanging from a hat’s brim, each fibre dip-dyed magenta at the tip and freckled with tiny gold beads. I read it as texture long before I read it as a person, a warm, bristling curtain lowered over the eyes. Only then does the skin assume its place beneath, deep brown and lit like honey, and I understand that the hat is not shading a face so much as raining softly onto it.
What holds me is not the beauty of the mouth, though the lower lip is full and slightly shining, but one small yellow bead resting exactly where an eyebrow should be. It is nothing, a fleck, and yet the whole picture reorganises around it. The straw veils her gaze and gives me her mouth instead; I am made to look at the part of a face we are taught to keep for intimacy. The image is frankly sensuous and entirely unashamed of being so.
The sitter is Naomi Chin Wing; the photographer, Txema Yeste, sits among the front rank of Spanish fashion image-makers, published across Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, forever pressing the body against natural things: straw, sun, dyed fibre, the warmth of an afternoon. As an archival pigment print, the surface keeps the pinks from turning garish and lets the golden light stay liquid on the cheek. I keep returning to that single bead of gold, as if the whole warm afternoon had been folded into it.
Colour comes before the face does: a fringe of frayed straw hanging from a hat’s brim, each fibre dip-dyed magenta at the tip and freckled with tiny gold beads. I read it as texture long before I read it as a person, a warm, bristling curtain lowered over the eyes. Only then does the skin assume its place beneath, deep brown and lit like honey, and I understand that the hat is not shading a face so much as raining softly onto it.
What holds me is not the beauty of the mouth, though the lower lip is full and slightly shining, but one small yellow bead resting exactly where an eyebrow should be. It is nothing, a fleck, and yet the whole picture reorganises around it. The straw veils her gaze and gives me her mouth instead; I am made to look at the part of a face we are taught to keep for intimacy. The image is frankly sensuous and entirely unashamed of being so.
The sitter is Naomi Chin Wing; the photographer, Txema Yeste, sits among the front rank of Spanish fashion image-makers, published across Numéro, Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, forever pressing the body against natural things: straw, sun, dyed fibre, the warmth of an afternoon. As an archival pigment print, the surface keeps the pinks from turning garish and lets the golden light stay liquid on the cheek. I keep returning to that single bead of gold, as if the whole warm afternoon had been folded into it.