Txema Yeste Spanish, b. 2/5/1972

A woman sits on a dark studio floor with her legs folded under her, naked, her hair swung forward across one side of her face. She is looking down and away. A human skull rests on the floor in the cradle her legs make, facing out, its lower jaw gone. The light comes in hard from the left and counts everything it finds: the clavicle, the ribs, the small hollow at the base of the throat, a scatter of moles down the arm. Her hands lie on her knees. On the right wrist there is a steel watch.

The skull is a prop and it announces itself as one. Vanitas, memento mori, the oldest arrangement in the studio. What the tradition never had is the manicure. The nails are long and lacquered and were done that morning, two thin rings sit on the fingers, and the watch is running. Somebody got ready for this. The eternity was carried in and set down on the floor. The Tuesday belongs to her.

Nudes of this kind usually ask you to look at a body and think about death. This one keeps putting a living day in the way. She is not gazing at the skull, or holding it up, or doing anything with it at all; it is simply in her lap, the way a cat would be, and her attention has gone somewhere off to the left of the frame. Yeste photographs her as a person who has agreed to sit very still on a cold floor for a while, and the agreement stays visible. That is what keeps the picture warm rather than morbid.