Txema Yeste Spanish, b. 2/5/1972

A foot, photographed at its own level against a grey ground, arched so steeply that the heel rides high and the whole weight falls on the ball and the toes. Around it black leather crosses and buckles: a broad band at the ankle, a strip over the instep, a row of steel eyelets. Beneath the raised heel there is no shoe at all, only a slender metal rod tapering to a small disc on the floor. The nail of the big toe is pale. Nothing else is in the frame.

Photography is unusually good at this. Strip an object of its context, light it evenly, and the picture stops describing a product and begins stating a proposition. With no body, no face, no room, the leather and the spike read as engineering, and the foot becomes the part of the machine that is soft. The medium's long habit with the isolated thing — the studio still life, the catalogue plate, the specimen — does all the work.

And the ambiguity is complete. This is a shoe, a sculpture, an instrument, an advertisement, and it stays all four because the photograph declines to choose. Black and white assists: leather flattens to a graphic black, skin holds a narrow band of greys, and the steel becomes the brightest thing in the picture. What we are given is less an object than the photographic conditions under which an object can be made to look inevitable.